Delaying Gratification
Under the canopy of a giant Shumard Oak grows a burgeoning tiny acorn forest. Baby sprouts have rooted in and are growing in the bed where all my flowers go. If the ground were left alone without any human attention, nature would probably take over and there would be a grove. Or, maybe the great oak’s canopy would shade out the sun’s rich sustenance, and all the saplings would return to dust. Maybe the baby seedlings would get greedy and nudge one another out. Most likely, per natural selection, some would die and some would thrive.
A lot could happen over time.
I, however, will never know what could have been. The sprouts have been ripped up and replaced by brightly colored impatiens. Under the roof of the Shumard, instant gratification grows.
On a podcast recently, I was asked to talk about the differences in my opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum-seeming careers. A sporting life, a writing life. I thought, and offered, that it would be easier to talk about the things they had in common as the two aren’t nearly as dissimilar as they might seem.
Whether she wants to or not, a ballplayer goes to the gym to work on her craft every single day. Some days as she gets her reps, the ball feels like an extension of her hand. It spins off her fingertips like butter, smooth and soft on an arc toward the rim. Some days the ball feels like it has square edges. She spends more time chasing errant misses than she does taking shots. The good days make her want to stay forever; the rough days make her want to quit and go home. Progress necessitates she treat the two imposters just the same.
Writers face the same grim odds. The only way to do it is to put your butt in the chair every day and write. A writer doesn’t wait on inspiration. (Newsflash: you will wait forever!) She just puts words on the page. One after the other after the other after the other. Some days, she finds one, then another shows up so she grabs it and before long a paragraph has formed. If she’s lucky, at least half of what she gets down is worth hanging on to. Some days (most days), she has to dig, and even then, most of what she wrestles into a shape ends up in the trash. She writes and erases. Writes and crosses-out. Writes and re-writes and re-writes and re-writes. Some days are diamonds, some days are stone—I think that’s how the song goes. Most, though, just turn out to be unremarkably hard. Plodding is how a writer makes her way.
Both pursuits rely on hours and hours of “by yourself” time when the lights aren’t on and nobody’s looking. Uphill battle days, downhill sliding days, lots of boring march-in-place days. Just you playing I-dare-you-to-blink-first with your craft.
A tolerance for crawling is required.
If we pause for inventory, most, if not all, of what we truly value took a while. Skill sets that propel us, art that moves us, gardens that ground and sustain us, none of it happened overnight. Neither did the relationships we can’t do without. Years of trudging through the treasures and the trash together is what forges us. Time is part of the equation. The work plus the wait times a thousand is how the good stuff grows.
The vibrant color of freshly planted impatiens pops in the shade of the umbrella oak. But they won’t last. They are one-and-dones I traded the future for.