The Gardener and the Sponge
Most of what you believe was absorbed before it was examined. That is not a failure. It is a starting point.
The other day, as I was taking my kids out to the park, I stopped at the door and said, without thinking, “Big G, little o, let’s go!”
The kids clapped. They could not wait to get to the slide. And I stood there for a second, slightly stunned. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that phrase before in my entire adult life. Not since childhood. That was the phrase my mother would say nearly every day as we left the house. I haven’t thought of those words in decades. I certainly didn’t intend to bring them back. But there they were, right on time, delivered in a tone I didn’t plan, to children who had never heard them before.
At first I thought it was just a fun memory surfacing. A phrase my brain had filed away and decided to pull out for the occasion. But then I started thinking about what else had surfaced without my permission.
Because “Big G, little o” wasn’t just words. It was a posture.
A key part of what I try to be as a parent is fun, engaging, adventurous. I try to make my time with the kids feel like an expedition. I try to give them space to be happy and sad, to encourage them toward curiosity and kindness. I practice patience when I’m frustrated, which happens quite often, because I don’t remember my parents losing their patience very much. I remember my parents making things fun and exciting. My mother, in particular, always had a game to play or a joke or something to turn the ordinary into an event.
These are values I brought into parenting without ever thinking about them. I didn’t write them down. I didn’t read them in a book. And I did read quite a few parenting books, most of which had practical advice about when to put the baby down and how to change a diaper, but none of which contained the phrase “Big G, little o, let’s go.”
The vast majority of what my parenting has become was absorbed from my parents. Not decided by me.
This is the work of what I’ve come to think of as the Sponge.
We all carry two minds when it comes to belief.
There is the Gardener: the part of you that tends your beliefs with care, decides what to cultivate and what to pull, and takes responsibility for what actually grows in your life.
And there is the Sponge: absorbent, automatic, the part that soaks up beliefs from the world around you without ever deciding to.
The Sponge is fast. It’s always working. It picks up values from your parents, assumptions from your culture, convictions from your peer group, and opinions from your social feed. It does this silently. It doesn’t announce what it’s collecting. It just absorbs.
The Gardener is slow. The Gardener requires effort. It has to be deliberately woken up, pointed at a specific belief, and asked: is this actually true? Do I actually hold this? And the Gardener, frankly, spends most of its time asleep.
The uncomfortable part is that most of what we believe, we believe because of the Sponge, not the Gardener. We think we’ve arrived at our convictions through careful reasoning. But if you could trace most of your beliefs back to their origin, you’d find they were absorbed, not chosen.
By looking at my biography, for example, you could guess many of my beliefs with reasonable accuracy. Small-town Georgia upbringing. Liberal arts education in history and creative writing. A half dozen years in Los Angeles working in the creative industry. A decade in Manhattan within commerce and business strategy.
The biography would sketch a decent picture of who I had become.
But was that really who I am? Fully? Am I just the sum of my experiences? Or had I, like most of us, simply allowed the Sponge to steer while the Gardener in me was asleep?
The Sponge isn’t always wrong. That’s important to say. Sometimes it picks up exactly the right things.
When I moved to Los Angeles for my first job, someone called me out for opening doors for people. They found it quaint and old-fashioned. One woman told me it was patronizing and macho. If you’ve met me, I’m not often complimented on being macho. So I stopped and thought about it. Where did this come from? I knew immediately: my father. He was always genteel and kind in many different ways, and opening doors was part of that.
But when I looked underneath the habit, I found something bigger than etiquette. The underlying value was that it’s important to be kind to other people. To treat them politely. To treat them with respect. To do something small that says someone cares about you, even if you’re a complete stranger.
I examined that belief carefully. I decided it wasn’t naive. It was positive and additive for everyone involved, including me. The Gardener agreed with the Sponge. That one stays in the ground. It’s growing well.
But the Sponge gets things wrong too.
Growing up in a small town in Georgia, there was no formalized education about the Civil War, but there were things you would pick up. By the time I was sixteen, entering my first serious American history class, the Sponge in me had collected the idea that the war was mostly about economics and politics. Trade policies, states’ rights, self-determination. It was less about slavery and more about competing visions of governance.
I don’t remember any specific person teaching me that. I’m not sure anyone ever said it explicitly. But I’d absorbed it nonetheless. And it was wrong. The evidence showed clearly that the Civil War was about slavery. Yes, economics were part of slavery. Yes, politics were part of slavery. But at the end of the day, that war was about slavery. The Gardener woke up, looked at the evidence, and pulled that weed out by the root.
That’s an instance of the Sponge working in a way that isn’t just unhelpful but harmful. And I had no idea I was carrying it until someone put the evidence in front of me.
The Sponge doesn’t stop working when you become an adult. It is not just a childhood formation tool. If anything, it speeds up in the modern adult world, where complexity only increases.
In college, I was part of a scholarship group that was, in many ways, life-changing. But the general profile of those invited into it meant that high achievement became a cultural foundation of the group itself. Many participants found themselves feeling the need to achieve rather than the need to be true to their own values or their own purpose. You saw people going into achievement fields - banking, consulting, law, medicine - without having decided whether achievement was actually the point.
I got pulled in too. I had never even considered achievement as an objective. I’d always just followed my interests. My first job was following my interests. But soon I was sucked back into the achievement vortex for grad school and became a full-fledged prince of achievement culture after a decade in Manhattan. The Sponge had done its work. I hadn’t noticed.
I also absorbed the default philosophy of New York and LA for a decade or more. You do you. Make your own truth. Everyone gets to define what’s real for them.
I accepted this because it felt like kindness. It felt like acceptance. But I never stopped to think about what it actually meant. If everyone can define their own truth, then there is no objective truth. I certainly don’t believe that. I believe everyone has the ability to make their own choices. But those choices will be either right or wrong, or somewhere in between. All choices cannot be right.
The Sponge had picked up the language of tolerance without the Gardener ever examining whether subjective truth, taken to its logical conclusion, undermines itself.
So what does it actually look like to wake the Gardener up?
First, you have to realize that what you’re looking at is a belief and not reality itself. This is sometimes the hardest part. Most of our beliefs are so ingrained that we assume they are the truth. Like oxygen in the air. But much of what we experience as “just how things are” is belief, not truth.
Once I’ve identified a belief as a belief, I like to explore it. What is its shape? What is it really saying? Are there other beliefs entangled with it? What is the logical conclusion of this belief? Not only what it says or intends, but what are the side effects? What things cannot be true if this belief is true? Are there obvious exceptions? Does this belief ring true in my lived experience, in history? Or does it only hold up in the abstract?
The Gardener, it turns out, isn’t a killjoy. It’s patient. It unpacks the noisy pile of ideas to see which ones are telling the truth and which ones are enthusiastic but less accurate. It doesn’t crush the Sponge. It prunes.
Here is the tension. We can’t be all Gardener. There is far too much information for any one person to process in a single lifetime. We have to absorb. We have to take some things on trust. The Sponge is not the enemy. It is a necessary tool for navigating a world too complex to reason through from first principles every morning before coffee.
But if we lean too far into the Sponge, we sink. We become waterlogged with other people’s assumptions, weighted down by beliefs we never examined, drifting wherever the current carries us. The meaning crisis so many people feel is not a mystery. It is what happens when the Sponge has been steering for too long and the Gardener hasn’t shown up.
This is what is really at stake.
Earlier I asked: am I just the sum of my experiences? A deterministic product of my environments? If the Sponge is all there is, then the answer is yes. You are just the residue of wherever you happened to land.
But every time you wake the Gardener up, you prove that isn’t true. The Gardener is not merely an intellect sorting through a pile. The Gardener is the part of you that decides what grows in your life, rather than accepting whatever seeds the wind blew in.
Examining a belief and deciding whether to keep it or set it down is not only an intellectual exercise. It is an act of self-authorship. The Sponge absorbs a self. The Gardener shapes one.
The question isn’t whether you’re a Gardener or a Sponge. You’re both. Everyone is. The question is which one has been doing the steering, and whether you’ve noticed.
In the last essay, I talked about the importance of having a map, a coherent set of beliefs you can actually stand on. But here’s the harder question: who drew the map you’re currently using? Was it the Gardener, carefully choosing what to plant? Or was it the Sponge, absorbing whatever happened to be in the water?
Big G, little o, let’s go. My mother’s phrase, stored for decades, springing to life in a doorway with my own children. That one, the Gardener hadn’t reviewed. But the values underneath it are still representative of who I’ve chosen to be. The Gardener would approve.
But not everything the Sponge picked up has held up so well. And if you’re honest, yours probably hasn’t either.
Pick one belief this week. Any belief. Something about what makes a good life, or what you owe the people around you, or what success actually means. And ask yourself: did I choose this, or did I just absorb it?
Wake the Gardener up, even for five minutes, and see what’s growing.