Two Weeks
and What the Lilac Knows

In May, the Riga courtyards fill with lilac. White, lilac, burgundy. It comes in dense, it comes fast, and the smell hits before you see the flowers. I walk through it every morning and every morning I slow down, even when I am late.

It lasts two, maybe three weeks.

Then the flowers drop. The clusters dry out. The bush goes back to being a bush: green, ordinary, slightly ungainly with its seed heads. For most of the year, it is not remarkable.

And every year, somewhere in those two weeks, the same question arrives: is it worth it? A bush that occupies space in the courtyard for ten months just to earn its place in two. By any rational measure, a poor return.

But nobody removes the lilac.

I manage a team. Not a small one. And somewhere in the middle of May, walking through the lilac smell, I caught myself thinking about the people I work with.

Good people. People who matter. People who have moments when they are unmistakably present: ideas sharp, voice alive, thinking fast, connected to the room. And the same people have periods when they go quiet. When they sit in the same meeting and produce almost nothing. When the energy is flat. When I wonder, briefly, if I am reading them wrong.

The first reaction is not noble. It is a small sting: why not today? Behind it, a quiet anxiety. Then something shifts: I want to find the task, the project, the conversation that turns the lights back on. Not out of obligation. There is a real excitement in it. The search for the right condition. The belief that the season is still there, just not visible yet.

But the lilac does not respond to intervention.

You can plant it somewhere with more light. You can water it correctly. You can not drown the roots. These things matter. But you cannot make it bloom in November by wanting it to.

The bloom happens in the window the plant actually has. Not in the window the gardener finds convenient.

This is not only true of lilac. I have traveled to places with very warm climates, where plants grow year-round. And even there, nothing flowers constantly. Everything blooms, fruits, rests, cycles. The window moves. The shape of the window changes. But the window is always finite.

I have learned to recognize bloom in my team. It arrives before I have named it. Confidence first, or maybe the eyes. A change in tone of voice, a faster rhythm of speech. The person becomes present in a different way: connected to the discussion, part of something, accountable for it. Optimism without performance. Calmness without withdrawal.

When I see it, I know it immediately. And the feeling is not relief that they are finally working.

It is something closer to recognition.

There you are.

And when it happens together, when something I did or said or arranged created the condition for that moment, that is the best part of the job. Not the delivery. Not the metric. The moment when a person who was quiet last week is suddenly the most alive person in the room.

Which means the absence of bloom is not the same as absence. A person who is not currently in their window is still in the ground. Still there. Still capable of what I know they can do.

The question is not how to force the window open. The question is whether I have created conditions where the window can come at all.

This is harder than it sounds. It requires holding two things at the same time: the disappointment of the flat meeting, and the memory of what the person looked like when they were alive in the room. The sting and the patience. The desire to fix, and the discipline not to uproot something just because it is not currently blooming.

Lilac does not need to justify the other ten months.

The two weeks are enough to make the courtyard worth crossing every morning.

I am not sure the same patience always holds in management. We are trained to track output, delivery, utilization. To look at the months when the bush is just a bush and ask what we are getting for the cost.

But when someone on my team enters their season, the room changes. The meeting changes. Something that was flat becomes real.

That does not happen by requiring it.

It happens because there was somewhere for it to go.