Today’s article is for you, even if you do not have a green thumb or room for a garden. If you feel challenged by chasing transactions, Ruth points out that “the true garden of the real estate profession isn’t in getting leads, instagram reels or closing deals. It’s in cultivating trust, guiding people through life’s biggest financial and emotional decision with honesty and care. Care. The human experience.”
What Is Growing In Your Garden? By Ruth Catchen
Voltaire’s Candide closes not with triumph but with a quiet directive:
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
We must cultivate our garden.
It’s deceptively simple. After a story full of chaos, war, greed, and heartbreak, Voltaire doesn’t offer escape or abstract philosophy. He offers responsibility: tend your patch of earth, your sphere of influence. Pull weeds, plant seeds, nurture what matters.
The Music That Haunts Me
I don’t just read those words. I hear them. Leonard Bernstein’s finale to Candide, “Make Our Garden Grow,” is most emotional. It begins simply, rises slowly, and culminates in a chorus of voices that radiate human hope — that even in a broken world, we can choose to plant, to nurture, to grow something real.
The music haunts me. I listen to it when I need to feel hope. It surfaces in my mind when I feel lost, when the world spins too fast, and it always brings me back to the ground beneath my feet.
The Garden in 2025
So what does cultivating our garden mean now? We live with more tools than Voltaire could have dreamed of: AI, instant communication, blockchain, global networks. But the challenge is the same: how do we use these tools to make us better humans, not just faster or more transactional ones?
In real estate, I see this tension every day. The business is cluttered with apps, platforms, and endless marketing noise. Agents are taught to chase transactions. It becomes about the agents, the transaction, the money. But the true garden of this profession isn’t in getting leads, Instagram reels or closing deals. It’s in cultivating trust, guiding people through life’s biggest financial and emotional decision with honesty and care. Care. The human experience.
The most hopeful seed to plant.
Technology can clear the weeds—streamline paperwork, share information transparently, make connections easier. But it can’t grow the garden for us. That part still requires patience, integrity, and presence.
A Musician’s Garden
As a musician, I learned cultivation the slow way: hours of practice, repetition, until it finally became closer to how I heard it in my head. The magic was that it was never the same twice. Music doesn’t bloom from shortcuts, imitation or mimicking. It grows from discipline, attention, and a willingness to live in tension between structure and chaos. It’s risk at a high level.
That same mindset—the gardener’s patience, the musician’s persistence—is what I carry into my teaching, my writing, my work with real estate professionals. The through line is always cultivation: time, care, presence. It’s something I won’t give up.
What We Choose to Grow
Maybe we don’t need to return to a “simpler time.” Maybe we need to create a simpler life inside this one. A life where technology serves us by clearing the ground, but the planting and tending—the truly human work—remains ours. Let all the transactional or technical things be done right and allow our humaness to make each one different.
Bernstein’s chorus lingers:
“We’ll build our house and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.” ***
It’s a reminder, a call to action, that in the middle of uncertainty, cultivating our garden is the most radical, hopeful act we can take.
So I ask you: What is growing in your garden?
*** A version with the composer conducting in 1989. One of my favs
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After a career as a performing musician and a STEM/STEAM educator, Ruth Catchen, took her collected life experiences and embarked on a real estate career that focuses on education and training to better the industry.
https://substack.com/@ruthcatchen
MORE FROM RUTH
https://thedataadvocate.com/the-great-real-estate-awakening-by-ruth-catchen/
In the paragraph entitled “Beyond the Transaction Theater”, Ruth asks ”What if success wasn’t measured by how quickly you could get someone to sign, but by how deeply you could educate them about their choices? What if the goal wasn’t to control the process but to illuminate it? I’m building something based on this radical idea: that consumers should understand every aspect of their real estate journey, whether they work with an agent or not. This isn’t about disintermediation—it’s about elevation.
Please take the TIME to read this: The Gift of Time 
https://substack.com/home/post/p-171207871 Because time is the one thing we can’t earn back, bargain for, or stretch. Every moment spent trying to be what someone else expects, or holding onto regret, is a moment lost. The only real power we have is how we choose to spend the time we’re given. In the end, it isn’t about how much time you had. It’s about how deeply you lived the time you were given.
https://substack.com/@ruthcatchen/p-171520725 —
One Year in California: A Different Kind of Anniversary
After moving from Colorado to California, Ruth lost everything in the California Eason Fire. Six months of displacement from the Eason Fire taught me what “starting over” really means. Living out of bags and boxes of newly accumulated belongings, waiting for answers, and navigating insurance and loss—it was more than a move; it was an upheaval. Challenges strip away what’s unnecessary and leave you face-to-face with what matters most. For me, that’s resilience, integrity, and a belief that this industry—and the people in it—can be better.
