By Jane Sonnenschein · August 12, 2026

“Chance favors only the prepared mind.” — Louis Pasteur

A few days ago, there was flooding back in my hometown, and I ended up having unusually long phone calls with both of my parents. When I thought about it, the last time I had really sat down and had a proper video call with my mother was probably sometime in May. Somehow, three months had passed. It wasn’t that I had deliberately avoided calling. I’ve simply noticed over the past few years that when there is nothing in my life that feels particularly worth reporting to my parents, I can keep putting off the call without even meaning to.

Earlier on, that avoidance was much more obvious.

After the pandemic, one thing after another happened in the family. People got sick. I lost my job. Business went badly. Money became difficult, and I even ended up in quite a bit of debt. During that period, I rarely called my mother on video. Partly because I didn’t know what to say, and partly because I really didn’t want her to know how badly things were going.

My mother is actually very perceptive. I thought I had hidden everything quite well, but she had already noticed. Once, she said to me directly, “Your dad might not be able to tell, but I knew something was wrong with you a long time ago. Every time I asked, you were vague and evasive.”

Once she pressed me that far, I finally told her what had been happening.

A few years earlier, I would have been afraid to talk to her about things like this. My mother used to be the kind of person who became very frustrated when she felt I wasn’t living up to my potential. She always thought that I was perfectly capable, but that instead of putting my energy into my own life, I spent too much time worrying about other people and ended up making a mess of my own path.

It was easy for her to say exactly the things I least wanted to hear: “I told you to listen to me years ago.” “Why didn’t you focus on building your own career?” “You’re just too foolish. You’re always thinking about everyone else.”

Of course, none of this came entirely from a bad place.

Over time, I began to understand that the reason she became so angry was precisely because, in her mind, I had always been a smart and capable child. She rarely praised me to my face. In the past, criticism was much more common. But from the things she said to other people, and from what she expected of me, I had always known that she didn’t think I was incapable. What she thought was: You could have done so much better. How did you end up like this?

But when someone is already having a hard time, hearing “I told you so” one more time does not make anything better.

So for a while, I really did become less and less willing to talk to her.

Over the past two years, though, I’ve noticed that my mother seems to have changed.

Or perhaps it isn’t only her. I have changed too.

Neither of us falls quite so easily into the old arguments after just a few sentences anymore. She is nearly seventy now, and perhaps when you reach that age, after watching your own child go through illness, unemployment and financial trouble, your priorities slowly begin to shift.

Maybe what once mattered most was, “Why haven’t you made more of your life?”

And now it has become something closer to, “You’re still here, you have things to do, and life is still moving forward. That is already something.”

That day, I told her that I was working evening shifts now too. She didn’t react with the disappointment I might once have imagined.

She simply said, “That’s good. That’s good.”

Then, unexpectedly, she asked me, “Weren’t you saying before that you’ve been writing?”

I paused.

A few months earlier, I had apparently mentioned in passing that I had started writing again. I hadn’t explained the website in detail, or told her about writing and publishing in three languages, or how many people were reading. To be honest, I had always thought it would be difficult to explain any of this to a woman who is almost seventy.

Then she asked, “So have you achieved anything with it yet?”

I said, “How could it happen that quickly? Writing is something you have to measure in years.”

I told her that one of my biggest problems in the past was that I could start things very quickly and learn very quickly too, but if I went a long time without getting any feedback, I tended to let them go. If I really wanted to keep writing this time, I couldn’t judge it by a few months anymore.

And then, to my surprise, she immediately said:

“You absolutely have to keep going. Believe me. Just keep writing, and one day you’ll definitely make something of it.”

What surprised me most at that moment wasn’t whether she was right about me eventually achieving something.

It was that, until then, no one around me had ever said to me so clearly: “You need to keep writing.”

People have listened to me talk about my articles. People have discussed them with me. People know that I write. Chris has always known about it too. But no one had ever told me so directly: Don’t stop. Just keep writing.

And the first person to say that to me was my mother.

The very same mother who used to be the quickest to criticize me, who thought I never listened to her, and who felt I had wasted too much of what I could have been.

My mother is a devout Buddhist. She recites Buddhist scriptures and has her own way of understanding the world through her faith. Later, she also told me that she had “asked about it for me.” She believed that good fortune would come to me, that I would meet people who would help me at important moments, that heaven would watch over me, and that if I simply kept going, my life would eventually change in a major way. She even said I might make a lot of money one day.

I didn’t take any of that as a prediction that now has to come true.

Everyone has their own way of making sense of the world. For her, these weren’t just empty words meant to comfort me. They were things she genuinely believed.

Through her faith, and in the language she knew how to use, she was telling me something very simple: she believed I should keep doing this.

And that, more than anything else, moved me.

Because she doesn’t really understand what people today might call the “writing industry.” She doesn’t know how a personal website grows. She doesn’t know why an article can be published and then sit there for a long time with almost nobody reading it. She doesn’t know how platform algorithms work, or how many years a writer may have to keep going before slowly building a real readership.

But she knows I can write.

She has read my diaries. She has read letters I wrote to pen pals when I was younger. She also knows that I once started my own magazine when I was at university.

Maybe I have never seriously asked her, “What do you actually think of my writing?”

But looking back now, I suspect she formed her own judgment a very long time ago: My daughter can write.

So when she heard that I had started writing again, she didn’t ask, “Why are you still bothering with this at your age?”

She didn’t say, “Can you even make money from it? Wouldn’t it be better to find a proper job?”

She simply told me: then keep writing.

Something else happened that same day. It was a small thing, but when I thought about it later, it somehow connected with that phone call.

Alicia has been doing woodworking at school recently. She loves this kind of thing. Give her a piece of wood and she can get excited about it for ages.

The day before, she had made a little table. She hadn’t hammered the nails in properly, so the long ends were sticking out through the other side of the wood. I told her it was dangerous.

She said very seriously, “It’s fine. I wrapped transparent tape around them.”

The next day, she somehow carried home another heavy piece of solid wood and made another table.

This time, it was a square board with four very short legs underneath. I asked why the legs were so short. She explained that there had only been one piece of wood, so she had asked the teacher to cut it into four equal sections. That meant the four legs could only be that tall.

The solid wood was too hard for her to hammer nails into, so she asked the teacher to help attach the legs with a power drill. The teacher put in one screw. She decided one wasn’t enough and asked for another.

There were already two holes in the board, and she excitedly pointed them out to me.

“Look, these are perfect for cups.”

The reason she had made the little table was because she wanted me to use it in bed. She said that in the mornings, she could bring me something to eat. I could sit in bed with the table over my legs, and there would even be a place for my water.

The finished table was certainly not polished. Some parts were crooked and uneven. But she was completely satisfied with it.

She also drew lots of pictures on it and made something she called “Spider-Man.” I stared at it for a long time and thought it looked much more like an alien.

But she insisted very seriously, “Isn’t this what you said you wanted yesterday? This is Spider-Man.”

When I watch her doing things like this, one thing is very clear: she is genuinely happy.

No one has asked her to do it. There are no grades. No rewards.

She finds the materials herself. She decides what she wants to make. When she can’t do something, she asks the teacher for help. If the wood is too hard, she figures out another way and uses a drill. She decides how to cut the legs, how to make use of the holes already in the board, and then, at the end, she carries that heavy piece of solid wood all the way home tucked against her side.

Later, I said to Chris that if a child grows up and manages to turn something she loves this much into a career, that would of course be a wonderful thing.

Chris said yes, of course it would. But not everyone can turn a hobby into a job. He had many interests when he was younger too, and some of them became so expensive that eventually he had to let them go.

And that is also true.

Loving something does not mean the market will pay you for it. Being capable does not mean you will necessarily be seen.

Writing is no different.

We have been talking a lot about persistence lately, and the more I think about it, the more I feel that success is partly about effort, partly about ability, and partly about something that can only really be called luck.

You can prepare. You can write. You can learn. You can slowly become better and more mature at what you do.

But you cannot decide when someone who truly sees your work will appear. You cannot decide whether the market will suddenly need what you are doing in a particular year. And you certainly cannot arrange for yourself to arrive at exactly the right moment when something suddenly takes off.

Many writers who are eventually noticed look back and say they had already been writing for seven years, ten years, sometimes more than a decade.

The day they finally become visible may arrive very suddenly. But before that day, there may have been years and years of work that almost nobody noticed.

And there must also be many people in the world who are just as capable, who have written for just as many years, and who still never become what people would call “successful writers.”

That is reality.

So these days, I am less interested in asking myself, “If I keep writing, will I definitely succeed?”

No one can answer that.

There is only one other question I can answer:

If an opportunity that belongs to me really does appear one day, will I be ready for it?

If the wind finally comes and you have no sail, it does you no good.

And at this point, I have at least solved one problem in writing that many people struggle with: I do not lack material.

I understand more and more clearly that my articles do not grow out of chasing whatever other people are writing about today, then finding out what topic is trending tomorrow, and trying to copy some supposedly viral formula.

Most of them come from my own life, and from thinking about that life again and again.

The same experience can be written about from one angle today, and then seen differently a few years later. I can begin with something happening now and write my way back into childhood. Or I can start with a small moment inside one family and follow it outward into questions about society and culture.

As long as I am still living, time is still moving forward, and my understanding continues to change.

Slowly, I feel as though I have grown a writing tree of my own.

Life is its root. My past experiences form the trunk. Every new observation and every new thought grows into another branch. Those branches keep dividing again and again.

So writing one article does not mean I have used up one piece of material. If anything, the more I write, the more there seems to be.

From that point of view, running out of things to write about is no longer what worries me most.

What I really need to learn is something that sounds much simpler, but has always been difficult for me:

When an article is finished, let it go out into the world.

No matter what kind of mood I am in that day. No matter how good or bad the numbers look.

In the past, if the data was bad, I didn’t want to publish. And once I did publish something, I couldn’t stop checking. The more disappointed I became, the less I wanted to publish the next piece.

But now I understand more clearly that if writing is something I need to measure in years, then how many people read one article today, or how many views one video gets today, matters far less than I once thought.

One bad set of numbers cannot prove that a path is wrong.

And one sudden viral hit cannot prove that someone has already succeeded.

What actually accumulates is everything that remains, one day after another.

So when my mother told me that day, “Just keep writing,” what I truly took from her words was not her prediction about my future.

It was simply the sentence itself.

Whether she believes in me, prays for me, or believes that someone will eventually appear who can help me—those things all belong to the future.

What I can actually do now is much smaller and much more concrete:

keep living, keep observing, keep thinking, keep writing, and when I finish something, keep putting it out into the world.

As for whether anyone will eventually notice, when that might happen, or whether I will ever happen to meet exactly the right combination of timing, circumstances and people, I no longer want to answer those questions on behalf of the future.

If luck really does come, I hope that by then, I will already be ready.

And if it takes a very long time to come, then at least I will not have stopped doing something I genuinely wanted to do simply because I was afraid it might lead nowhere.

Maybe this is the first time I have truly understood that persistence is not a beautiful slogan from some success story.

It is simply deciding to keep doing what you can today, even when you still have no idea how the story will end. “

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version：“你就坚持写下去”：我没想到，这句话会从妈妈嘴里说出来

German version: „Schreib einfach weiter“: Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass ausgerechnet meine Mutter das einmal zu mir sagen würde