“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it”,
Vincent van Gogh, the renowned artist whose paintings became one of the most priced art works never walked a paved road if he could help it. He chose wheat fields, asylums, and nights under starlight. He chose discomfort. And 130 years later, his words still sting: “Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
It’s a line that keeps resurfacing on Instagram bios, graduation speeches, and therapist’s offices. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s true.
The paved road is everywhere. The 9-to-5 (8-to-4 in Nigeria) with pension. The degree your parents approved. The relationship that “makes sense on paper.” The opinions you nod to so dinner doesn’t get awkward.
It’s smooth. Predictable. Safe.
But Van Gogh’s point was brutal and beautiful: safety doesn’t bloom.
A psychologist in Warri, Nigeria sees it daily in her practice.
“People come in at 35, 40, 50 and say ‘I did everything right. Why do I feel empty?’” she says. “Because they never planted anything. They just walked.”
Flowers don’t grow on asphalt. They grow in cracks. In failure. In the decision to quit the job and start the bakery. In the artist who paints despite no gallery calling. In the student who studies music when the family wanted law.
Van Gogh knew this intimately. He sold only one painting in his lifetime. He was called mad. He wrote 800 letters trying to explain what he saw. The paved road of “normal” 19th century life — a pastor, a dealer, a respectable job — rejected him. So he went off-road. And from that dirt came ‘Starry Night’, ‘Sunflowers’, a legacy that still moves millions.
That’s the paradox: the places that hurt us most are often the places that grow us most.
Look around Warri, Benin City, Port Harcourt, Lagos, Abuja. You’ll see it: The 27-year-old who left banking to farm plantain.
The content creator who was told to “get a real job”.
The spouse who walked out of a “good marriage” to find peace.
They’re not rebelling for rebellion’s sake. They’re looking for flowers.
“Normality tells you to be quiet, be small, be the same,”, says Chuks, who left a corporate role to run a skate and art collective. “But I’d rather struggle and feel alive than be comfortable and numb.”
Van Gogh wasn’t romanticizing suffering. The off-road path is lonely. It’s unpaid invoices. It’s family asking “when are you getting serious?” It’s doubt at 2am.
But the paved road has its own cost: regret.
As novelist Chimamanda Adichie once said in a lecture, “The danger is not that we fail. The danger is that we never try.”
Maybe that’s what Van Gogh meant by flowers. Not success. Not fame. But evidence that you were here. That you tried something honest. That you chose beauty over convenience.
The paved road will always be there. It’s well-lit and mapped.
The other road has weeds, mud, and no GPS. But it has flowers.
You don’t have to quit everything tomorrow. Sometimes the flower is a weekend class. A poem. Saying no. Saying yes. Starting small.
Van Gogh died thinking he’d failed. Today, his paintings sell for $100 million. The world finally caught up to the road he took.
The question is; Are you ready for the ‘dirt road’?