Bloom Where You're Planted
Nobody wanted Josh Allen.
Not Fresno State, the hometown school his family had rooted for since he was small. Not a single D-I FBS program across the country.
He was 6’ 3”, a hundred and eighty pounds, throwing 90 from the mound and putting up points on the basketball court in a farm town outside Fresno nobody had heard of.
Elite quarterback camps? No sir. 7-on-7 circuit? No mam.
While the rest of the country was busy manufacturing single-sport prodigies - kids shipped to camps, traded between schools, polished like show ponies - Firebaugh couldn't afford that luxury. The boys played whatever sport the season handed them, because there weren't enough of them to do it any other way
So Josh threw a baseball in spring, drove the lane in winter, and slung a football in fall. In between, he worked. He worked the family farm. He worked his mother's restaurant. He grew up with dirt under his nails and a family that believed that was a fine thing.
When the bigger Central Valley programs came calling after his breakout junior year, the kind of call most families spend their kids' childhoods praying for, the Allens said “No”.
The family had a saying for it: you bloom where you're planted. Josh would finish where he started.
What followed wasn't a fairy tale, it was a grind.
Not a single FBS offer out of high school. Junior college at Reedley. Mass emails to every offensive coordinator in the FBS culminating in two scholarships.
One of them, Eastern Michigan, pulled the offer the moment he visited the other. That left Wyoming. They hadn't even been recruiting him at first. They'd come for a different kid at Reedley. But they warmed to Josh, drove out to the farm, sat with his father, and told him his son could be the face of their program.
You know the rest. MVP. The face of one of the most electric offenses in football. A franchise quarterback hauling a city on his shoulders, often without the weapons other stars take for granted.
What gets me about Josh's story is that most of us spend our lives waiting to be transplanted. Convinced the grass is greener somewhere we haven't gotten to yet.
Better pay. Better partner. Better boss. Better anything really.
We treat the dirt beneath our feet like a layover, eyes locked on the horizon, hunting for any patch of grass that shines a little brighter than the one we're standing on.
I'm guilty as hell. I've worked jobs half-present, moonwalking through Mondays while I waited for some better version of my career to show up. I've dated people while quietly wishing they were a slightly different person (as if love were a casting call). I've wished my body leaner. My home bigger. My writing discovered.
Different fences, same view: anywhere but here.
These days I try to catch myself at the fence. To notice the staring before it steals another afternoon. To turn around and look, really look, at the yard I've been given.
It's good. The grass is greener than I give it credit for. The light hits it just right. The work is honest and the people are mine.
Bloom where you're planted, I tell myself. Stop measuring your patch against the one over the fence. Tend the one you're on. Water it. Pull the weeds. Trust that something will grow.
It usually does. Slowly, and not on the timeline you'd have picked. But the work compounds. The yard fills in. The marriage gets easier. The job becomes a craft. The body remembers what it's for. The writing finds its readers.
And one day you look up and realize the life you were waiting to start was the one you were already living.
The fence is still there. You just stopped staring over it.
So tend yours. Whatever it is. Whatever season you're in. The grass on the other side has its own weeds, its own droughts, its own neighbors looking longingly back at your yard.
Bloom where you're planted. Most people won't and you can.
Not perfectly. Not all at once.
Just here, and now, and again tomorrow.