Harvesting from this year’s season

by Julienne Givot | May 19, 2014 | All Articles, Featured Articles, In search of wisdom blog | 3 comments

image ©Carol VanHook

I’ve been contemplating the fact that we are now almost half way through 2014.  How did that happen and where did the last 5 months go?   More importantly, what season is it? I mean this metaphorically.   It’s almost Summer here in my part of the western United States – but what season is it for me, in my life and business?   What needs further tending and what is ready for harvest?  So when I read the following from Poet and Author David Whtye’s recent article entitled 10 Questions that Have No Right To Go Away it was thought provoking for me on many levels – at least 10 of them.   Below is from Whyte’s list (it’s number 3):

Am I harvesting from this year’s season of life? “Youth is wasted on the young” is the old saying. But it might also be said that midlife is wasted on those in their 50s and eldership is very often wasted on the old.

Most people, I believe, are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation. I see it all the time, in my own life and others. The temptation is to stay in a place where we were previously comfortable, making it difficult to move to the frontier that we’re actually on now.

People usually only come to this frontier when they have had a terrible loss in their life or they’ve been fired or some other trauma breaks open their story. Then they can’t tell that story any more. But having spent so much time away from what is real, they hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact with the true circumstance. So the trick is to catch up with the conversation and stay with it —where am I now?—and not let ourselves become abstracted from what is actually occurring around us.

If you were a farmer, and you tried to harvest what belonged to the previous season, you’d exhaust yourself trying to bring it in when it’s no longer there. Or attempting to gather fruit too early, too hard or too late and too ripe. A person must understand the conversation happening around them as early in the process as possible and then stay with it until it bears fruit.

If we have a tendency to be operating well behind the curve of our own growth, then how do we go about finding out just what season we are in and not have to wait for a major life issue to do it for us?  Undoubtedly we will benefit from having this knowledge so we can harvest what’s ready, re-plant or just let a field lie fallow for a while.  In true poetic fashion Whyte doesn’t give us the bullet list of ways to suss this out.

Our first tendency might be to look to the paradigms of where we ‘should’ be in our lives based on age, culture, gender etc., but those no longer really hold true across the board.  Rapid fire communications and access to vast amounts of information online has created a cultural diversity not bound by any single society.   We are freer now to do our own thing outside of social convention because they’ve been diffused and scattered.   You can be 60 and going back to school, 40 unmarried and thrilled about it, 22 and starting your own multi-billion dollar business.  So without referencing a cultural norm (which frankly, I think is a great relief) how does one go about assessing their own season?  Whyte points to listening for the core conversation of your life.  This conversation holds the elements of the season.

©H.Koppedelany

I had to give this a try for myself.  Archetypes are obviously a core part of what I do, so why not let them do some of the heavy lifting on this job?

When you run your own business you are often many people at once, Administrator, CFO, Boss and Worker Bee.  I experimented with letting my archetypal office staff  give their answers to the question of season.    I conducted a faux interview with each voice and asked them about their accomplishments and experience of 2014 so far. I asked what needed further tending, harvesting or just simply some rest.  What I came up with was fascinating and useful.

I also found it helpful to pay close attention to the conversations that were going on in my life with myself and others.  I looked at what archetypes were driving the conversations and responding.  A week or so in, I realized that the core conversations were pretty clear and some surprising answers to the seasonal question came up.

If you are game to give it a try, here is a simple exercise to help you work out your own seasonality.  I bet you’ll be surprised by what you come up with and in turn, gain a clearer understanding of your next steps.

Discovering Your True Season

Every day for a week, before you go to bed,  jot down a list of the following.   No need to write the entire conversation – just the key points like a newspaper headline. Don’t read the list from the day before.

• 5 situations I worried about today.
• 5 conversations I had with myself today.
• 5 conversations I had with others today.  This could be anything, a chat with an office mate, partner, the lady in the check out line.
• 5 things I was excited about today.  If you don’t have 5, write down what you wanted to be excited about instead.
• Things I was asked to do today.   This could be what you were literally asked to do or something you felt called to do like smile at a stranger, or buy a co-worker a coffee, ignore a phone call.
  

On the 8th day (maybe a Sunday over coffee and when you have time to relax) take out your notes.  Rip out the pages and set them on the table side by side.   Read them in order, mix them up and glance over them again.  Too many wildly different conversations? Maybe it’s mid-summer and some weeding needs to be done to make room for the truer harvest later on.  What’s coming up with no fruit and needs some fertilizer or perhaps a winter’s rest?  What has you really excited and needs some planting?  Lots of requests for the same thing? Maybe it’s harvest time.  Whatever comes up for you, the essential clues come in the form of the season that your ideas need right now, the next steps are naturally going to be clearer.