Leave the Watermelon on the Vine

From This Week's Love Letter

The tricky thing about a watermelon is that it can look ready long before it actually is. And if you pick one too soon, there is nothing you can do to make it sweeter. A watermelon does its ripening on the vine. It needs the sun and the soil and the water, and it needs something we have such a difficult time giving the things we love: time.

I think about how often we struggle with this in our own lives. We want to know when the relationship will deepen, when the work will take off, when the answer will come, when the thing we have been tending will finally be ready. Sometimes we want it so much that we begin pulling on it. We look for signs, push for answers, or try to make decisions before we have enough information because the not-knowing is uncomfortable.

But so much of what becomes meaningful in our lives takes time.

Trust grows as we take a step, listen, and then take another. Trust and listen. Trust and listen.

Connection deepens only as we open our hearts, before we know if that connection will be reciprocated.

Wisdom comes from moving through the muck of an experience rather than finding a way around it.

Dreams take shape through hundreds of small choices and acts of devotion that may not look like much while we are making them.

This is the kind of patience I have been thinking about this week. Not patience as simply waiting for something to happen, but patience as tending. We keep watering. We keep showing up. We keep doing the work that belongs to us while allowing the things that are precious to us the time they need to ripen.

Maybe there is something in your own life right now that you keep thumping, wondering, Is it ready yet? Instead of asking how you can make it happen faster, perhaps ask:

What does this need from me today?

There may be something more for you to do. And there may not be. Sometimes we have tended something well, and the most loving thing we can do is leave the watermelon on the vine.