CATEGORY: Little Pieces Of Life

The Farmer

Today’s story is about a farmer who had spent almost his entire life working in the fields. He knew the land well. He knew when it needed water, when it needed to be left to dry, when the time was right to sow, and when there was simply nothing more he could do but wait. His hands had grown rough from years of work, and for as long as he could remember, his days had followed the rhythm of the earth.

That year, he had sown his field as he always did. He had carefully prepared the soil, opened the furrows, and placed the seeds into them one by one. In the days that followed, he watered them, cleared away the weeds, and every morning, before beginning the rest of his work, he walked through the field to see whether they had started to grow.

His son worked alongside him. He was still young, a dreamer, and somewhat absent-minded, at least in his father’s eyes. He could stop in the middle of his work to watch a bird flying low over the field or spend a long time gazing at the clouds, as though somewhere among them there were something more deserving of his attention than the chores waiting for him. His father often teased him about it. Deep down, though, he loved this side of his son. Perhaps because it reminded him of a way of looking at the world that he himself had forgotten many years ago.

One day, the farmer heard about a new variety of seed that had begun circulating among other growers. Very few had tried it yet, and no one could say with certainty how well it would perform. Still, what he heard was enough to spark his interest. If the crop did well, the produce could be sold at a better price, and their income that year might increase considerably.

He thought about it for several days. He was not a man easily carried away by promises. On the other hand, he knew that sometimes, if you wanted something to change, you had to be willing to try something you had never done before. In the end, he decided to buy the seeds. When he brought them home, his son was the first to want to see them.

“What’s different about them?” he asked.

“We’ll find out when they grow,” his father replied.

His son smiled.

“I like that we don’t know.”

His father laughed.

“I’d rather know.”

Over the next few days, they prepared a section of the field together. The father measured the distances, opened the furrows, and checked the soil. His son followed beside him, sometimes helping and sometimes stopping to observe something that had caught his attention.

When they finished, the farmer stood at the edge of the field and looked across the earth. He had done everything he knew how to do. Now he had to wait. And that, though he did not yet know it, would prove far more difficult than sowing.

For the first few days, the farmer waited patiently. He knew well that the earth followed its own timing and that no seed sprouted simply because someone stood over it waiting. When the first tiny shoots appeared, he felt relieved. There they were, slender and bright green, much like all the other shoots he had watched emerge from the earth over the years. Except this time, it was different. This time, he expected more from them.

During the first week, he watched them with interest. By the second, he had begun examining them more closely. He bent over them, studied their leaves, pressed his fingers into the soil to check its moisture, and tried to remember exactly how they had looked the day before. He was no longer certain they were growing fast enough. He began going to the field earlier in the morning. Before eating, before attending to any other task, he wanted to see the plants first. Sometimes he returned again in the afternoon.

His son watched him without saying anything. One day, the farmer asked whether the plants seemed a little small to him. The young man looked at them for a moment and said he wasn’t sure, but they had seemed smaller yesterday. The farmer wanted to know how much smaller. “I didn’t measure them, Father,” his son replied with a laugh. But the farmer did not laugh.

He had begun making calculations. If the crop yielded what he hoped, he could sell the produce at a good price. Perhaps they could finally repair the roof before the rains came. There would be more money left for the winter and, if things went particularly well, perhaps he could even buy the small piece of land beside theirs that he had been thinking about for years.

Without realizing it, he had already begun living inside a harvest that had not yet arrived. And the more he imagined everything it might bring them, the more afraid he became of losing it.

He began watering a little more. Then he worried that too much water might harm the plants, so he cut back. He loosened the soil around them, removed even the smallest weeds, and examined the leaves for some sign he might have missed the day before. Every time he did something, he felt better for a while. At least he had the sense that he was not simply standing by doing nothing. But the relief never lasted long. The next day, he would return to the field and the plants would seem exactly the same.

One afternoon, he told his son that he had to do something. The young man was lying a little farther away, his hands behind his head, watching the clouds. He told his father that he was already doing everything he could. “It isn’t enough,” the farmer replied. His son turned towards him and simply asked, “How do you know?” The farmer did not answer. He didn’t know. And perhaps that was what troubled him most.

Over the following days, thoughts of the crop began following him everywhere. At the table, while he worked, even when he lay down at night. He thought about the soil, the water, the weather, everything he had already done and everything he might not yet have considered. He was constantly searching for one more thing he could do, something that would give him the certainty that everything would unfold exactly as he had planned.

Until one morning, he stood alone between the rows of plants and looked at them for a long time. They were healthy. They were green. They were growing. Just not as quickly as he wanted them to. He bent over one of the young plants, held it gently between his fingers, and pulled it ever so slightly upward. He stopped and looked at it. It seemed a little taller. For a moment, he stood perfectly still. Then he reached for the next one.

His son had begun to notice his father’s impatience. At first, it had not seemed strange that he was spending more time in the field. He knew how much his father expected from this harvest and understood his anxiety. But as the days passed, he could see that something had changed. His father no longer went to the field simply to care for the plants. He went there to make sure they were growing.

The young man watched him bend over the tiny shoots, touch the soil, examine the leaves, and then return only a few hours later to look at them again. It was as though he expected to witness, in the course of a single morning, what nature needed days to accomplish.

His son saw things differently. Perhaps because he was still young and had not yet learned to measure everything by its outcome. He liked observing what happened around him without always needing to explain it. Many times he had watched bare branches remain unchanged for weeks, only to discover tiny new leaves on them one morning. He had seen fields that appeared empty turn green within days. No one stood beside them reminding them to hurry.

Seeds had their own cycle. They would open when they were ready, send roots into the earth, search for water beneath the soil and, when the time came, find their own way towards the light. Neither he nor his father could make that process happen any faster. They could provide water, good soil, and care. But beyond a certain point, they simply had to allow the seeds to do what nature had known how to do long before either of them.

His father seemed to have forgotten that. Perhaps because this time he was not simply waiting for a few plants to grow. He was waiting for everything he had already attached to them: more money, the roof he could repair, a more comfortable winter, perhaps even that small piece of land he had dreamed of buying. He had placed so many things from the future upon a handful of small green shoots that every day spent waiting now seemed wasted. And the more afraid he became that he might lose that future, the more desperately he tried to bring it closer.

His son began to understand that his father was no longer trying merely to control the harvest. He was trying to control time. To make nature move a little faster, to bypass the waiting, to demand from it today an answer it was not yet ready to give. But nature was in no hurry. It had no reason to be.

The young man looked at the little plants standing quietly in their furrows. He did not know whether this new variety would ultimately produce the harvest his father hoped for. He did not know whether it would be abundant or poor, or whether it would prove worth the money they had spent. And strangely, not knowing did not frighten him. For now, the plants were alive. And that was enough.

As he watched them, the son began to wonder whether life was really so different from that field. There were things he could choose, things worth working for, persisting in, and caring for. But there were also things that, no matter how much he wanted them, he could neither force into being nor decide when they should arrive. Perhaps, he thought, the difficult part was not always trying harder, but recognizing the moment when you had already done what was yours to do and had to allow life to continue along its own path. He looked at the little shoots and smiled. “Maybe,” he thought, “what is truly meant for me does not need to be chased until I exhaust myself out of fear that it might pass me by. I may not know when it will come or how. But I can continue caring for what is in my hands and learn to trust a little more what is not.” Perhaps that was what it meant to surrender to life—not to sit passively waiting for it to bring you everything you wanted, but to stop living with the constant fear that you had to control everything in order not to lose what was meant for you.

One afternoon, the son found his father bent over the plants again. For a while, he stood beside him without speaking. He had understood that advice was not what his father needed. Perhaps he simply needed another way of looking at what was happening.

“Father, do you think perhaps miracles happen in stillness?”

The farmer raised his head and looked at him, puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

The young man sat on the ground and picked up a small clump of earth.

“I was thinking about the seeds. We put them into the ground and then, for a while, we see nothing. And yet everything is happening down there. They are growing roots, changing, preparing to reach the light. We don’t see any of it. If we didn’t know better, we might think absolutely nothing was happening.”

His father remained silent.

“And perhaps life is a little like that,” his son continued. “Sometimes we become impatient because we cannot yet see what we are waiting for. We think we have to do more, push a little harder, catch something before it disappears. But perhaps some things simply need their own time. Not our time. Theirs.”

The farmer looked at his son differently now. Until that moment, he had often seen him as a young man who daydreamed more than he should, someone who could stare at the sky for hours and forget the work in front of him. For the first time, he wondered whether those moments he had always considered absent-mindedness might actually be another way of observing the world. Perhaps his son was not wasting time by looking. Perhaps he was seeing things that the farmer himself, in his constant hurry to stay ahead of life, had stopped noticing years ago.

“And what if you wait and nothing happens?” he finally asked.

His son smiled.

“Then we’ll know when that time comes. Why live through something now that hasn’t happened yet?”

The farmer lowered his eyes towards the plants. For the first time in many days, he did not bend down to touch them.

That night, the farmer found it difficult to sleep. His son’s words returned to him again and again. “Do you think perhaps miracles happen in stillness?” He wondered how long it had been since he had allowed something to unfold without trying to predict how it would end. He had learned to work, to strive, to plan ahead, to protect his family from whatever he could, and he had always considered all of that his responsibility. But perhaps somewhere along the way, he had confused responsibility with control. He had done everything within his power for that harvest, and yet instead of feeling at peace, every day he searched for one more thing to do, as though enough effort could guarantee the outcome. For the first time, he considered that leaving the plants alone did not mean that he no longer cared or that he was giving up. Perhaps it simply meant recognizing the point where his work ended and nature’s work began. And as he closed his eyes, a thought that once would have frightened him now felt strangely comforting: he did not need to know tonight what tomorrow would bring.

In the weeks that followed, the farmer continued going to the field every morning. He watered when the soil needed water, cleared the weeds, and cared for the plants as he knew how. But he no longer examined them constantly to see how much they had grown. He stopped measuring them with his eyes and searching each day for signs that would reassure him that everything was going well. He did what was his to do and, when he was finished, he left.

Almost a month later, one morning he stood at the edge of the field and, for a few moments, could not quite understand what had changed. The plants had grown taller, their leaves had become fuller, and among them were the first signs of the harvest he had waited for so long. It had not happened suddenly. It had been happening little by little throughout all those days when he had stopped demanding to see it.

His son came over and stood beside him.

The farmer smiled.

“You were right after all.”

The young man looked at him, puzzled.

“About what?”

His father gestured towards the field.

“About stillness.”

His son smiled but said nothing.

The farmer looked at the plants again. He still did not know how abundant the harvest would be, how much money they would earn, or whether everything he had planned would come true. And for the first time, he did not feel the need to know.

He had begun to understand that caring for something was not the same as trying to control its course. He could prepare the soil, plant the seed, give it water, and protect it. But he could not decide when it would take root, when it would bloom, or exactly what it would give him in the end.

Some things in life ask for our effort. And others, once we have done all we can, simply ask us to give them space. The farmer started to leave, but after a few steps, he stopped. He turned towards his son, who had already sat down at the edge of the field and, as always, was gazing somewhere above him. For a moment, the farmer hesitated. Then he put down his tools and sat beside him.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

His son smiled.

“Nothing.”

This time, his father did not tell him to get up.

He stayed there with him.