[Greetings, friends, from Mason City, Iowa! I hope everyone who celebrates had (and is having) a fantastic Christmas holiday with friends and family. It’s a wonderful time to recharge and reorient yourself toward what’s highest as we prepare for the new year.
Being back in the town where I was born and raised always brings a flood of memories. And every time I return, the experience is a little different. Because both of us have changed—it is not the same city, and I am not the same man.
A few days ago, I ran past the place where I went to high school. Moments experienced by my teenage self flashed into my mind—images from my years in those halls floated up from my subconscious and filled the surface of my conscious. Some were pleasant; others, painful.
What was common among all of them? Each event left an impression; a handprint on my heart. Each memory carries a story of something that shaped me into the man I am today, even if only in a tiny way. If I send myself up to 10,000 feet, I can see how my early days prepared me for my path today.
It’s something I couldn’t see back then—back in the days of being a confused, insecure, and overthinking teenager who was sure he’d disappoint all the people who told him he’d do great things. Heck, he would have just settled for good ones. But even those seemed to be a stretch. He wouldn’t find his anthem until law school, but when he did, he found it describes us (he and I) perfectly: “I always fear that I’m not living right…”1 (see below for the Jon Bellion music video).
Sitting here today, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I wish I could leave him a letter with lyrics from a different Jon Bellion song: “Stay the course, young man, there’s light at the end of the tunnel that you’re digging.”
All of these thoughts turn my attention to the wisdom of the seasons. How all is a gestation and bringing forth—a growing and a dying, life followed by death followed by new life. Maybe it’s being back in the barren days of a Midwest winter, months away from new life bursting. Maybe it’s being back in a city that was the setting for so much of my formative years and development. Or maybe it’s just the spirit of the season alive inside me. Most likely, it’s some combination of the three.
Regardless, it is to the wisdom of the seed that patiently winters, that I devote the rest of today’s essay.]
Winter is a time when branches are bare, and grass has gone brown. It is a season where little evidence remains of the life that was in earlier seasons. Nature wipes the slate clean, blanketing over the old with white, preparing for a new Spring to bring new life. It is also a season that brings with it a reminder: do not long for things that need more time.
A popular metaphor among the Stoics illustrating the futility of looking for things outside their season was the fool looking for figs in winter. Figs, a plant native to the Mediterranean and western Asia, are in season twice a year: the first few weeks in June, and then again between August and October. For the Stoics, to look for figs in winter was to violate a core tenet of their philosophy to live according to Nature and wish for nothing contrary to it.
“As they that long after figs in winter when they cannot be had,” writes Marcus Aurelius, “so are they that long after children, before they are granted them.”2 Epictetus uses the metaphor to make a similar point:
But if you wish for [figs] in winter, you are a fool. So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter.3
The point both Marcus and Epictetus were trying to make with this image was this: the one who wishes for something they cannot have (due to forces outside their control) and the one who wants something outside its season suffers needlessly. As does the person who wants results without the process, growth without patience, and outputs without inputs:
Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes and figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe. So if the fruit of a fig tree is not brought to maturity instantly or in an hour, how do you expect the human mind to come to fruition, so quickly and easily?4
If someone as magnanimous as Marcus Aurelius needed to remind himself to “stop expecting figs in winter,” each of us striving to do something and be someone can expect to grow impatient with our results from time to time. Perhaps it’s the progress we’re not seeing or the silence that responds to our efforts. Whatever it is, we are bound to bump up against periods where things aren’t happening on our timeline. Life isn’t coming together according to our schedule. In those moments, it’s helpful to check ourself. Are we looking for figs in winter? Have we been patient enough?
“Think of yourself just as a seed patiently wintering in the earth,” C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend, “waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking.”5 Think of yourself as a caterpillar in its chrysalis, gestation until the day it might emerge as a beautiful butterfly.
Just as the figs will arrive when it’s their season, so too will we if we focus on the work and forget the timing. “By your patient endurance, you will gain your souls.”6
Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.7
Each of us knows: all great things take time. Yet we still find ourselves searching for shortcuts—forgetting that it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft, years to become a great athlete, and decades to build wealth. We catch ourselves looking for figs in winter.
As we head into 2024 filled with the energy of new resolutions, it’s something worth remembering: anything worth doing will likely take longer than we want it to. Losing weight, writing a book, running faster, lifter more, whatever. But it costs what it costs. And to wish for it to cost less is to be like the fool and wish for figs in winter. You don’t control the work it will take. But you do control when the clock starts and stops.
“Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”8 “Don’t demand an audience with the king or push for a place among the great. It’s better to wait for an invitation…”9
Don’t wish for figs in winter. Do the work. The rest will take care of itself.
—
P.S. Like many of Jon Bellion’s songs, when I listened to Human, I felt like someone had peered into the thoughts I was scared of thinking and captured them perfectly. Warning: it’s not a happy song., So if you’re not in a reflective mood, perhaps you save this one for another day. :)
P.P.S. 2:50 hits me hard every. single. time.
“See, I got GPS on my phone.
And I can follow it to get home.
If my location’s never unknown,
tell me why I still feel lost…”
Jon Bellion, Human.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.24.
Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.
Epictetus, Discourses, 1.15.
C.S. Lewis, Letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, dated June 28, 1963.
Matthew 21:19.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, p. 13-14.
Epictetus, Enchiridion, Ch. 8.
Proverbs 25:6-7.