How many days are inside a pear?

Embracing the irrelevance of our work

How many days are inside a pear? That’s the koan I’ve started pondering when it comes to my writing. Days of budding, blossoming, fruiting, and ripening. Sunny days. Rainy days.

“When did you start working on this essay?” Sarah in my writing group said last Sunday night on our monthly Google-meet.

I had to think.

“I guess it’s been…a year.”

Last winter, feeling frustrated by the time-constraints of work and parenting, I decided to start waking at 5 a.m. to write for an hour. I was so excited to get started that the night before my first session I couldn’t sleep. By the time 5 rolled around I was too exhausted to think straight. But I corrected the next night, and the next, and after a month I had a draft of…something.

Deep down I knew the essay wasn’t done but sent it out anyway, the kind of wishful-thinking submitting I’m still prone to after 25 years. As the inevitable rejections rolled in and I re-read it, I felt grateful to the editors who saved me the embarrassment of premature publication. I stopped sending it out. And I gave up on the 5 a.m. writing routine.

Instead, I started writing around the edges, in 10 to 15 minute sprints, revising one paragraph at a time—or sometimes a single sentence. Or sometimes just re-reading it on my phone in the five minutes before getting out of bed for the day. Little by little, a new essay emerged from the old one, as though from a blossom. I painstakingly learned what it was I'd been trying to say all those bleary-eyed mornings last winter. Then one day a few months later, without quite realizing it, another final draft hung like a big fat pear in an orchard, ripe and ready to be picked.

Now.

There are lessons in this. About patience. Presence. Making do with the time you have and not the time you wish you had.

But I want to talk about something beyond the practical. I want to talk about the irrelevance of our work, yours and mine, as a way of shaking off the unnecessary psychodramas we put ourselves through when writing. Why should I have been so anxious to send something out that wasn’t ready? It’s nice to connect with readers and on the rare occasion make a buck. But is that remotely commensurate to the fretting I do? What difference does one pear make in an orchard full of them? How many will the wind take? Or the wasps? So what if they fall?

Let me humbly suggest that the things you’re stressing about with your writing—just like the things I’m stressing about—don’t matter very much. The world is not waiting around for us to speak. Let me also suggest: this is for the best. You, my friend, by virtue of your irrelevance, are free to say whatever it is you need to say, and free to write from the dead center of your life. You can be whatever it is you want to be on the page. You are the true and only owner of your story.

I suspect much of our anxiety about our writing—and about our not writing—stems from shame. The shame of being desperately starved for attention and love. The shame of not being more honest with ourselves about what we need in terms of time and space to create. The shame of having been bested, again and again, by fear. The shame of our limitations. The shame handed down to us from our mothers and fathers like a precious family heirloom. What would it mean for you—as a person and as a writer—to let it go?

How many days are inside a pear? The question is a reminder that writing is a process that won’t be hurried or bargained with. It’s also a reminder that a pear tree doesn’t worry and fret and try to justify itself. It makes pears. Even in its winter rest, it steadily works its plan. Let’s be like that, my writer friends. Let’s be tenacious, generous, and unashamed through all the days inside us.