The flowerbed’s neat border cannot tell you how healthy the roots are.

A tidy edge is a statement about maintenance, not about health. Roots do their work out of sight, and nothing visible from the path will report on them honestly. People and households and teams get read the same way, by their borders. Neatness is easy to produce quickly, which is exactly why it is a poor measure of anything slow.

Pick one thing you have been judging by its appearance and ask what the underground version looks like. That might mean a real question to a friend who always seems fine, or an honest look at your own week beneath its orderly calendar.