You are not wasting your time

Here’s a photo of some withered blackberries, taken on a recent walk around the woods and fields where I live. It was a wonderful summer for blackberries. They grew fat, juicy and abundant. We made many pies and crumbles. Picking them was a delight.

I felt a little sad when I noticed they had started to fall away. So many berries left unpicked and untasted. All the effort those bushes had put into bringing their fruit into the world, wasted.

But this is just nature doing what it does. Life bringing forth life. The blackberry bushes quietly going about their business, producing what they can in the conditions of the season. Really, there is no waste.

Inevitably, I see a metaphor in this. All those ideas I’ve had yet done nothing with. All those moments when I could have been writing but did something else instead. I could judge myself harshly for not harvesting all these fruits. But I can also be grateful for the abundance.

A creative mind will produce an abundance of ideas. A creative life will produce an abundance of moments. They can’t all be used, maximised, optimised or whatever – we are not machines.

Yet we often feel like we’re not making the best use of our time or moving forward with things in the way we’d like, and experience that with a sense of loss, frustration and waste.

At such times can we trust in abundance? More ideas will come. More moments will come. We have all the ideas we need, all the talent we need, all the time we need. If you don't believe that to be true for yourself, pretend you do. See what changes.

*

Changing Everything

By Jane Hirshfield

I was walking again
in the woods,
a yellow light
was sifting all I saw.

Willfully,
with a cold heart,
I took a stick,
lifted it to the opposite side
of the path.

There, I said to myself,
that's done now.
Brushing one hand against the other,
to clean them
of the tiny fragments of bark.