Grow. Kneel to no (wo)man

A landscape has no single author. No one finishes it and signs it. Soil, water, light, season and time shape it, along with the people who tend it. Perhaps that is why Aniket Bhagwat, a globally recognised and influential landscape architect, designer and educator, in a podcast titled "Landscape Architecture is the Mother of All Arts", gives the discipline such a place of honour. It holds sculpture, architecture, painting and movement in one living frame, and it never stops changing.

Learning works the same way. We like to imagine greatness as a monument: a hero standing alone and complete. But monuments are what we build when we stop growing. Hero worship hands us the finished statue and hides the years of weather, failure and patient tending behind it. We copy the form and miss the process.

No one saw this danger more clearly than the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Raised by a spiritual movement to be its World Teacher, he dissolved the organisation built around him in 1929 and declared that truth is a "pathless land". He spent the rest of his life warning that the guru-follower relationship breeds dependence: the follower borrows certainty instead of earning understanding, and the teacher becomes a crutch. Blind followership, he argued, is not devotion but a way of avoiding one's own thinking.

Real greatness, then, is mostly self-taught, much as a garden is cultivated by its own conditions. You cannot force a plant to grow, but you can prepare the ground. The learner has to struggle, misjudge, observe and adjust, and that struggle is what trains mental agility.

Mentorship is the gardener's light touch: a little pruning, a stake for a weak stem, a warning about frost. The best mentors know their own journey well enough to show the dead ends and the luck, so their path looks walkable instead of miraculous. They never radiate invulnerability, and they work toward becoming unnecessary. In that sense, the mentor Krishnamurti would have accepted is one who refuses to be a guru.

So admire the great, but don't kneel to them. Study how they grew, then tend your own ground.