The other day, while reading Quando inizia la felicità (“When happiness starts”) by Gianluca Gotto, an Italian author, a passage really made me pause.
To give some context, the characters were in Costa Rica. They had woken up early to go to the beach with a local guide and witness turtle eggs hatching. The book explains that in very touristy areas, the people responsible for protecting the turtles sometimes use shortcuts to make them hatch faster. Not all tourists have the patience to wait two or three hours, so when the first turtles come out, they dig up the remaining eggs and break the shells from the outside to “help” them emerge.
And then this happens: many of the turtles die immediately, because they weren’t ready yet. Others manage to get out, but they are too weak and too small, and they die on the beach while trying to reach the sea. Even the ones that make it into the water are often too weak to swim properly or feed themselves, and they don’t survive.
That passage stayed with me.
It made it clear how often we approach our desires in ways that aren’t truly beneficial. We try to rush the process, to interfere, to make sense of every step. In doing so, we increase the chances of frustration, disappointment, and the illusion that things “aren’t working.”
In the manifestation world, this is often called “messing with the middle.” We want to understand and speed up the materialization process in the 3D, so we step in and try to control it. But this reveals a lack of trust — a need to make logical sense of something we are not yet meant to fully comprehend. Most of the process happens behind the scenes, away from our view, and we are not supposed to witness every single step.
Shortly after, in the same book, the author talks about another journey, this time in Vietnam. He describes visiting a rice field surrounded by rows of very tall bamboo plants. He was told that for the first five years, bamboo grows entirely underground. It builds deep, solid roots. And then, suddenly, it breaks through the surface and can grow up to twenty metres tall in just six weeks.
When people say that manifesting is easy or fun, it can be hard to understand at first. Now it is clear: yes, it is easy, but only once we understand how it works and what is happening beneath the surface.
The moment a desire arises, the world begins rearranging itself around it. There is nothing to force or fix. The only real requirement is knowing who we are beyond our limited human identity.
That said, the desire has already been claimed. The work is done. What remains is to allow the egg to hatch at its own natural pace — and to go enjoy life.
Many of us have struggled with enjoying the present moment. There is often a fear that relaxing, having fun, or fully inhabiting the now means we are no longer “working on” our desires — as if letting go would make them disappear. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Enjoying life is not a requirement, because there are no requirements here. And yet, if the eggs are hatching anyway, why sit and wait anxiously on the shore? Why not move, explore, laugh, create, and experience what is already here?
Trust does not look like effort. It looks like presence. It looks like living.