Every year, around this time, something shifts in our kitchen before it shifts in the sky. The first monsoon showers soak the hills next to our farm, and a few days later, we can walk over to the bamboo grove at the foothills and come back with an armful of young shoots.

We turn them into curries — coconut milk, mixed beans & jackfruit seeds — recipes that exist for exactly this one window of the year. Miss it, and you wait twelve months.

I think of Japanese philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka whenever this season turns. He spent a lifetime insisting we eat what the land offers when it offers it — not because it's romantic, but because food eaten in its own time carries something out-of-season, cold-storage food doesn't. A seasonal calendar isn't a menu. It's an agreement with a place.

What strikes me most about the bamboo shoot is that it's not just seasonal, it's singular. Not a crop offered up in quarterly instalments. The bamboo spends most of the year doing something invisible — building an underground network of rhizomes, storing reserves, quietly getting ready. Then the rains come, and it spends nearly everything it has saved, all at once, in a short, urgent burst of growth. It commits its capital once, at the moment conditions are right, and not a moment before.

There is no quarterly review in that grove. No mid-cycle check-in asking the bamboo to justify eleven months of apparent dormancy. The forest simply trusts its own rhythm.

I say this with real affection for the people I actually work with — corporate professionals, business leaders and founders navigating quarterly targets, board reviews, investor updates. This isn't a case against structure. Someone has to show up and account for the last ninety days. I deeply respect how much energy it takes to hold short-term delivery and long-term direction in the same hand, without dropping either.

And I do wonder, half seriously, how a bamboo grove would manage if someone asked it to. It gets to disappear underground for eleven months and answer to no one. A business leader doesn't have that luxury — they hold the long game while still showing up every quarter with something real to say, keeping teams engaged and investors reassured, even as the slower, unglamorous work of shifting a culture, deepening capability, and building trust keeps going in the background.

Balancing the immediate and the enduring, quarter after quarter, takes a kind of sustained energy the forest never has to summon. I have a lot of respect for anyone doing that well.