wilting a little, in the meantime 🥀
aka what gardening is teaching me about ambition, part 2
In early Autumn, where I live—you can grow jalapeños, but you can’t grow lettuce.
Even in late September, when Starbucks has already dragged out the PSL signage from their storage rooms and Spirit Halloween stores have popped up in formerly abandoned strip malls, it is still too hot to grow lettuce.
But I wouldn’t have guessed that, because dozens of recently-misted, crispy looking, gigantic heads of lettuce are stacked up against jalapeños by the hundreds in my grocery store’s produce section now, and all year-round.
“Ok really, Alexis? You didn’t know about different kinds of produce being ‘in-season’ at different times??”
No, I did! I knew that every plant had a unique growing season. To be honest, I assumed that if something was out of season when I tried planting it in my little garden bed, it just wouldn’t grow.
But I didn’t know that every fruit and vegetable would try to grow anyway—no matter how “out of season” it’s current conditions were.
I didn’t know that heat-sensitive lettuce could grow, happily, alongside heat-loving jalapeños for multiple months of a dry Californian summer, and then suddenly—like, overnight—shoot a stalk almost two feet in the air, flower immediately, and turn every single one of its leaves intensely bitter.
Apparently, when a plant senses that environmental conditions could threaten it’s ability to survive, it “rushes to produce seeds to ensure the continuation of it’s genetic line.”
It’s a process called “bolting” and in my garden, it looks like this:
It’s as if my lettuce-friend read the proverbial room and realized conditions had changed. That it would need to shape-shift to survive. WAY too hot. Lush leaves are no longer practical. It’s bolting time.
But imagine if Lettuce felt those environmental conditions shifting and thought to itself, “Doesn’t matter; I should be able to handle this. What’s wrong with me?”
Imagine that Lettuce ignored its physiological clock, continuing to pour energy into growing more leaves, more output, more productivity, regardless of the heat. “Can’t quit now. Just gotta keep my head down and push through.”
It would destroy itself. And for what?
Which brings us to what gardening has taught me about ambition, part 2:
growing is different than producing.
This lettuce plant IS growing.
It’s just producing something different than I expected.
I wanted lettuce to eat in salads and sandwiches. Thanks to decades of familiarity with grocery-store-lettuce, I expected its leaves to be crisp, not mushy—and for its flavor to be mild, not bitter. And that IS possible for this lettuce plant. But not here, and not now. Not in these circumstances, and not in this phase of its growth.
It’s fine that I want my lettuce to be crisp and mild, but that doesn’t give me the right to claim that this lettuce plant “isn’t growing,” or to pretend that my expectations can somehow override seasonality.
It’s not that a plant cannot exist outside of whenever it’s “in season”—it’s that I’ve arbitrarily decided which version of its existence I consider acceptable.
This is a problem of my expectations, not the plant’s capacity.
have you confused your expectations with your capacity, too?
Grocery store crops confuse us because we only see one, brief phase of that plant's life cycle: the productive phase.
Ripe tomatoes, juicy lemons, crispy lettuce, knobby ginger root, heavy and hollow watermelon…we’re looking at the results of each species’ one productive season.
We forget that each plant produces its fruit at a different time, under different conditions, than the plant next to it. And we forget that because we’ve erased those conditions, by piling hundreds of them on top of each other, all at once, all under one roof, in the produce section.
“Winter” growth looks very different than “Summer” productivity.
Winter growth is incremental—so undeniably slow that to most of us, it looks like death. But this assertive conservation of resources is GENIUS, because access to sunlight, nutrients, and water has been increasingly scarce since Autumn.
Summer productivity on the other hand, is expressive: public-facing, prolific, obvious; there’s fruit everywhere. But that’s because resources were so abundant in Spring—plenty of sunlight, water, and nutrients in the soil—that plants could funnel all that excess energy into a growth spurt, first with lush leaves and now, with juicy fruit.
Both seasons are growth. They just look very different from each other.
If we don't know that growth will look different during different seasons, we’ll confuse adaptability with failure.
→ Are you being flakey, or are you being flexible?
→ Are you giving up, or are you adapting to new information?
→ Are you stuck, or are you intuitively conserving resources?
gentle reminders for people who wish they didn’t have seasons, direct from my phone’s notes app:
Ambition is the hunger to grow. I’ll always have this drive to grow (all living things do), but I need to stop assuming that the results of my ongoing hunger (ambition) will always look the same.
Growing is different than producing. I am always growing. I am not always producing, nor am I meant to.
My brain and body are going to try to grow anyway—no matter how “out of season” my current expectations are. I can reduce unnecessary suffering in my life by adapting to those conditions, and not confusing my expectations with my capacity.
I will no longer measure my success by any form of productivity, including output, creativity, or sociability. Productivity is only one brief phase of my growth.
“Success” is continuing to be alive—to grow and adapt—at the pace that matches my circumstances and energy budget.
If everything suddenly feels like a struggle, that’s not a failure—that’s a season shift. It’s time to change my expectations. Usually, lower them. Adapt to this season’s reality, so we can thrive into the next one.
I will no longer try to skip over the slow, low, and quiet seasons to “get to the good part.” I can’t skip this. Low and slow is winter; low and slow is energy conservation.
To avoid demanding productivity from myself at the wrong time, I have to learn to tell what “season” I’m in, based on my current access to resources.
What are my uncomfortable emotions telling me about what my body needs right now? Do I need more support? Less time alone? More structure? Less routine? Am I rushing myself? Am in a Personal summer? Winter? Spring?
Are you a shriveling lettuce head, under the impression that your leaves should be crispy and fresh?
Take a moment and zoom out. What season are you growing in?
That’s what I thought.
What are you doing trying to be productive in this unrelenting econom—I mean, unrelenting heat? Your delicate cell structure was not designed to produce in every season.
Look, we will be little lush lettuces once again, but we have to be willing wait. Our seasons have to cycle through. What if, instead of trying to "fix" what's "broken" in our lives, work, routines, projects—we considered directing that precious energy elsewhere?
Maybe toward caring for our tired hearts, seeding next season’s growth, and allowing ourselves to wilt a little in the meantime?
Anyways,
—Alexis
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