At some point, someone placed a dog-run cable in the crotch of this tree. It had a simple purpose: give the dog somewhere to run.

The tree kept growing.

Year after year, the bark slowly formed around the cable until something that once rested against the tree became part of it. There probably wasn't a single day when someone could have looked at the tree and said, Today it changed.

That's rarely how gradual change works.

Most of the time, we notice what's sudden—the new job, the move, the loss, the beginning. But some things happen so slowly that we don't recognize what's changing until enough time has passed for us to see the difference.

The tree didn't decide one morning to grow around the cable. It simply kept growing.

And eventually, something that wasn't part of the tree became part of it.

I wonder how often we miss this kind of change in the people closest to us. We see our children every day. We work beside the same people for years. We know our friends and families so well that it can become difficult to notice who they're becoming.

Sometimes the people we know best are changing right in front of us—and we're still seeing the version of them we met years ago.

Who in your life might deserve to be seen for who they've become, rather than who you remember them being?