Every day I open my phone and check. How many sales, how many new people, how much of what I’ve planted has already sprouted. I work hard – building, writing, creating – and yet when the numbers don’t reflect the effort, I feel dissatisfied. I want a harvest from something that is only now putting down roots.
Sound familiar?
My mind asks the same question every day: “Where’s the harvest? Are the apples ready?” And the more often it asks, the more exhausted I feel. Not from the work. From the measuring.
There is another question. I rarely hear it – I have to reach the edge, completely worn out by all the measuring, before it comes. Then, somewhere deep inside, I hear: “Did I water the tree?”
That’s the question that matters. You can stand in front of the tree every day, count apples that aren’t there yet, and wait – it won’t bear fruit a day sooner. The tree bears fruit because you water it and give it time. The harvest was never in my control. The watering is.
For a long time I confused a lack of results with a lack of progress. Sometimes I still do. But they’re two different things. Something can grow without being ripe yet. Without being sold, without bringing in income, without being visible. Growth and harvest don’t arrive on the same day.
One possible reason the mind wants apples every day
I recently talked about this with a client in a coaching session. Her design, like mine, combines three things that together make waiting (which we interpret as doing nothing) especially hard.
The first is the sacral center – the Generator’s sustainable working energy. The energy craves to be invested and to come back as satisfaction. When you apply your internal drive and don’t see results as quickly as you expect, the mind decides it was wasted.
The second is a specific strength in our design that brings ambition and an instinctual knowledge of which ideas, people and processes have a future. It also adds pressure from within: a tension that wants release now, not in three months.
The third is undefined willpower. When you don’t have constant access to a sense of your own worth, it’s easy to start proving it with results. A productive day means you’re enough. A day without visible results means you’re not.
Together, these three create the same pressure: more, faster, and something you can see. The mind won’t let us put energy into something that looks unproductive today. And yet that’s how most things that matter grow.
My design has its own rhythm – it responds to life, it doesn’t force it. My mind, on the other hand, has always had a schedule. Lately I keep reminding myself that my job is not to speed up time. My job is to stay in my own rhythm while time does its work.
Which tree are you watering right now, without seeing any apples yet? What do you count every day – and does it wear you out? What would change if, for the next three months, you asked yourself not “Where’s the harvest?” but “Did I take care of my tree today?”
Where to from here?
If you recognize yourself in these questions, The Transition Map is the place to explore them. I help people who are living someone else’s life find their own. Six months of individual work in three directions – where you are, who you are, and which way to go – in which, together, we analyze what in you is steady and what you’ve taken on from others.
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