When Nothing Grows: A Reflective Journey Through the Fallow Time Between Jobs

I heard about the wisdom of letting fields lay fallow from my grandmother who was raised on a farm. Her father, she told me, sectioned their farm into seven fields. Each year, he left one unplanted. He didn’t tend it. He left that field to grow wild and had his animals graze on it to restore its fertility. The next planting season he plowed under whatever weeds had grown and sowed crops again.

I don’t farm and I don’t have seven “fields” in my life. I have three—two that I tend out of sheer love—writing and music, singing to be precise, and one—accounting—that I also enjoy, but work to make a living.

It’s one thing to render something fallow by design, it’s another to be rendered fallow and perceive that nothing is happening. That’s where I am in my accounting life and I can’t say that I like it. I don’t feel that I’m restoring or re-wilding any of my productive capacity. I don’t see anything happening in response to my efforts, at least not in the way I’m accustomed to.

And I’m weary of the hit to my confidence.

But fallow doesn’t mean dead, nor does it mean inactive. I think it means allowing and, for me, maintaining faith in what I can’t immediately see. So, me feeling that my efforts are going into a void isn’t reality, no matter how strong the pull to fall into its pit.

Life and regeneration are constant, seen or unseen. I repeat this as a mantra to keep my hope alive.