What Won’t Wait: Lessons from the Garden.
Several days ago, I went out to pick cherry tomatoes that were so abundant, they were weighing the vines almost to the ground. I had whizzed by the garden not once in the preceding days, but several times. With each pass, I noticed the bursting red fruit with a smile on my face at this late summer gusto, but also felt a pang of stress, as I didn’t stop to pick any.
Later, I thought. Later.
I am in a busy season, working diligently to bring a new and meaningful program to fruition, and it is soaking up whatever energy I have left in a day. Energy that used to go towards gardening, cooking tasty weeknight meals, and spending evenings relaxing instead of working in the glow of my computer screen.
It was a Saturday morning when I made it out to the garden. Ahhhhhh, sigh. The weekend had finally arrived. I had dreamed up a nourishing meal based on the final push of my garden and planned to pick all those beautiful tomatoes and the last of the cucumbers while I was at it. My eyes feasted on the clusters of tomatoes—so many!—but my excitement faded almost instantly, as the first few I picked were mushy, falling off the vine as soon as my fingers lightly grazed them.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no!
They were all overly ripe and past their prime. I felt an unease in my belly. I had waited too long and needed to pick quickly now.
Isn’t this what happens in so many realms of life—a missed opportunity or, more regrettably, something squandered? Then, to make up for it, we rush around to salvage what we can in a frantic, almost manic attempt to recapture what we bypassed. Hunched over in my garden, a sickening sense of urgency and disbelief in my gut, I faced the truth of my own actions. I missed the opportunity to enjoy the height of the season’s offerings, and I felt remorse about spending the last four months tending to this garden only to abandon it at the end. Regret upon regret—the worst kind, because I only had myself to blame for each tomato’s split skin, for the splattered and rotting red refuse littering the ground around my feet.
How much joy and delight do we squander, and for what?
I had to sit with that question, realizing that the entire harvest was a loss. Almost every tomato was rotting. There had been days of rain earlier in the week, causing the fruit to absorb too much water and expand more rapidly than the skin could grow. Had I picked them after the first day of rain, I would have had several pounds of tomatoes. It would have only taken me about ten minutes in the garden, maybe twenty if I puttered a bit, as one is often inclined to do while gardening. Instead, I kept telling myself, Tomorrow. I will do it tomorrow.
It can wait, I told myself.
It couldn’t wait, and it didn’t. I felt a heaviness over this truth as I walked away from all that fruit, which I had picked and put in the compost. What a waste. Waste of effort, tending, resources, water, organic fertilizer, and food. I felt embarrassed about throwing away food that could have been salvaged with a twenty-minute investment of my time. All because I thought joy could wait.
“We have to know what we love and what delights us. And we have to tend to that as seriously and as fiercely as we tend to what is broken and what we’re called to make better and more just.”
—Krista Tippett, On Being Podcast
Being in my garden is pure joy. The tinkering, daily checking, and tending to a living thing that asks for very little in return. The hope I carry in my heart each season when I plant tiny seeds is that a thing will grow and feed the bees, the birds, and my family. I had let go of joy because I thought I could make a living, growing thing wait on my terms. This is the relationship we have with pleasure these days, where we can often make things happen exactly when we want them to, controlling so many aspects of our lives with the touch of a button. We control our dopamine hits, and I thought I could ask nature to abide by my schedule, wait for me, let me hit the button of “ripen” when I wanted. Nature does not wait, and joy won’t either. We either look out the window to see the sunset or miss it. We either stop and gaze into the eyes of our children when they talk to us, or we miss the moment of connection. We either go for a Sunday leaf-peeping drive, indulging our sense of time and change, or stare at someone else’s experience on Instagram, a millisecond of engagement on a flat screen.
This seemingly small lesson, a bunch of rotten tomatoes in a backyard garden, has made its impact and doesn’t feel small at all. I am dumbfounded by my arrogance and disregard for how little I control. There is no lesson wasted when we take them in with reverence—and I have. Yesterday, I went out to the garden in the early morning, my hair still wet and only half-ready for work, and took the time to harvest the next batch of late-season tomatoes that the good earth was generous enough to offer me. I didn’t rush; I savored the time in the garden, the sun promising another day of warmth, but the cool air was a gentle nudge that winter was coming. Today, I honored those tomatoes by planning a special lunch with friends, themed around the last harvest. As I sat outside and shared not only time with others, but also food I had grown and tended, my heart and belly were full. No one else knew what I was feeling as we ate the sweetest of the sweet tomatoes offered all summer; that I had just been handed a life lesson in the form of food dying on the vine. They could not know that I was both reverent and humbled by the garden’s teachings of what won’t wait.
Enjoy the slow- Heather