Time: A Pollinator’s Perspective
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
One of the things that I find most fascinating about pollinators is that they rarely, if ever, see the fruits of their labours.
Indian palm squirrels only live two to four years, whereas the coconut palm seeds they help to create take six to ten years to grow into trees. The heavenly scented plumeria trees pollinated by hawk moths also take three or more years to bloom. Hawk moths are lucky if they live longer than thirty days.
That's unwelcome news for someone as impatient as I am. I don’t just want to know where to deposit the metaphorical pollen I’m picking up, I want to see the ensuing seeds grow into trees that freely offer delicious fruit and shade. Unfortunately, pollination doesn’t work that way.
A lot of the time, it’s going to look like I’m wasting well, a lot of time. Working on this website is a great example of that. Just imagine how much time it took for a pollinator like me to bring some semblance of organization to my scattered thoughts and ideas. Some paragraphs took a full day to wordsmith. Some days all I did was delete paragraphs that took full days to perfect. Sometimes I felt extremely anxious about my finances and considered giving up altogether so I could job search. Often I worried whether the sacrifices I was making would be worth it.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t often feel frustrated not knowing whether this effort would “pay off.” But almost every single day that I worked on this project, I went to bed feeling full and I woke up hungry for more. I don’t know if my efforts will bear any fruit, but more and more I understand what the American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist (a true pollinator!) Buckminster Fuller meant when he wrote “The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it’s a different kind of life.”
