To Choose What is Gleaned

“To harvest life like standing stalks of grain//Grown and cut down in turn.”

The key part of this aphorism comes at the end; “In turn.” Nothing is born overnight; it must be cultivated and watered, until it is ripe for the picking. But there is more that can be gleaned from such a harvest than just the good stalk: when Marcus Aurelius speaks of life, he means life and all that it entails, which is not always something favorable. As in any garden or plot where things grow, it is inescapable that there will be the unwanted: weeds. And although literal weeds are accepted negatively, when speaking in terms of “weeds” in our lives, they can be rather good. The weeds will grow no matter who we are or what our circumstances are, that’s part of the nature of being human. But part of the beauty of humanness is learning to see the weeds and then laboring to remove them. A well tended field may, initially, be just as overrun with pests and weeds as an ill-tended one. However, if the gardener sees that his field is in decay, and so chooses to go out every day to remove the weeds as they come in, he is a good gardener. But if he sees the weeds and thinks, “What’s the use? If I remove these today, there will only be more tomorrow” then he has just forfeited his own life. Soon the weeds will overrun his crop, and he will in the end have nothing to harvest except the weeds and rotten crop. Although it may be futile to completely remove every bad thing from yourself forever, and so achieve perfection, which we cannot, I think it speaks beautifully to another nature of humanity, one that seeks to constantly better itself regardless of our chronic humanity. It was for this reason that I chose this aphorism, because I believe it vocalizes what our own “harvests” can be like, growing and harvesting things in turn, gleaning both the good and the bad, and then taking the seeds of the good to sow the fields anew.