Every Tree Has Fruit
On Stress, Toni Morrison, and Recognizing Your Fruit
Last week Monday I drove to Sesquicentennial State Park with a small adhesive sticker in my hand. It was the chaperone tag for my wife, who had driven straight from a twelve-hour overnight shift as an emergency room nurse to meet her son’s class at the park entrance.
She had not slept. I had not slept much either, for different reasons.
My job was simply to hand her the sticker. That was it. Eight seconds of errand. Then I planned to drive to my office.
On my desk awaited a stack of eighty-five final exams I had not yet touched. Beside the stack, a list of summer writing projects I needed to begin mapping out—the kind of list that always looks more manageable in May than it will feel in July.
In my email, family travel logistics for the trips coming up in the next few weeks, half-confirmed and threatening to unravel. And in the back of my notebook, the creative work I keep promising myself I’ll protect: a short story I’ve been pushing forward in fifteen-minute increments, a poetry book I’m revising one page at a time.
I handed my wife the sticker. I turned to leave. And then, to my surprise, the teacher said, “Oh, you can stay if you want.”
My mind said go.
But I looked at my son, and my lips said ok.
I want to try to explain what happened next, because I think it has something to do with how those of us on the tenure track survive a life that is structurally designed to keep us slightly broken.
The Concrete Jungle
I grew up in New York City. I learned, early, to live on the constant adrenaline of the concrete jungle—the sirens braided into sleep, the velocity of strangers walking by, every block bringing a fresh problem to solve before the light changed. Not to mention the violence that felt mundane, police officers patrolling corners as routine.
By the time I was a teenager, I had learned to read pressure as a kind of music. I didn’t know any other way to feel alive, and my breathing often matched the speed of the city.
What I couldn’t reconcile, then, was the boy who also loved being a Boy Scout. I made Eagle by my senior year. I earned the merit badges—wilderness survival, first aid, swimming, leatherwork—and I treated each one like a small, serious vocation.
I slept in tents. I burned my fingers on tinder. I lay flat on my back at night under a sky that, for some reason I couldn’t name, made my chest loosen in a way nothing in the city ever did.
I would have told you, if you’d asked, that I liked it because of the fires, or the friends, or the doing of hard things that required patience and skill.
None of those answers were wrong, but none of them were true either.
The truth was something the boy version of me couldn’t quite articulate: out there, away from concrete and headlights and rumbling trains, something within me went quiet.
And, I forgot about that quiet for a long time.
Quietly Unwell
Throughout graduate school and into my first years on the job as a lawyer, and later as a law professor, I built a life that ran on the same fuel as my city.
I optimized. I hustled. I treated rest as a thing I’d earn once I’d cleared the next obstacle, knowing all along I’d never declare the obstacle cleared.
Submission, then waiting for reviews. Reviews back, then revising. Tenure, then the next promotion. The next rejection. The next presentation. The next conference. The grind, as it’s now called, isn’t an aberration in academic life.
It’s the operating system.
We lionize it in job talks and worship it in our calendars. New York City’s particular pressure had simply migrated with me into the academy, where everyone was gripped in roughly the same way that I was, a tightness that looked like it was normal.
I want to say something plainly, before I go any further.
I think a lot of us are quietly unwell.
We are struggling, and we have stopped noticing because everyone around us is struggling in the same way.
I recently learned that stress is not really the situation we are in but the pressure of suppressed and repressed emotional energy that we are carrying through the situation. A measure, in other words, of how much of ourselves we have refused to feel.
Fatigue isn’t the cost of the work. It’s the cost of all the small daily refusals it takes to keep doing the work without admitting how it actually feels. The grant rejection we walked off in five minutes. The colleague’s slight we explained to ourselves and moved past. The version of our research we abandoned because it wasn’t fashionable.
We do not metabolize these moments. We bank them.
And, eventually, the bank starts charging interest.
What the Ranger Said
Before we walked the trails, the ranger gathered the kids—seven and eight years old, restless knees and endless questions—under an open-air wooden shelter in the woods.
She had the gift good rangers have. She could keep that age group with her without performing, just trusting that if she slowed down, the woods would do most of the work.
She told them, sitting there in the shade, that every tree has fruit.
Even the trees we don’t think of as fruit trees. The acorn is the oak’s fruit. The pinecone is the pine’s. The little winged seeds spinning down from the maple, those are fruit too. We just don’t recognize them, she said, because they don’t look like an apple. The kids nodded the way kids nod when something obvious has been confirmed.
Then we walked out into the trees, and she kept asking them:
What do you think the fruit of this one is?
They guessed. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes she pointed up into the branches and showed them what they had walked past their whole lives without seeing.
I stood at the back of the group and felt something in me reorganize.
The Wrong Shape
Quietly, I realized that I had spent most of my adult life doing what I suspect many of you have spent yours doing too: comparing my fruit to other people’s fruit and concluding, with the steady misery of a person who cannot stop checking, that mine is the wrong shape.
The colleague’s book at the better press. The friend’s grant. The acquaintance’s profile in the magazine. The mentor’s CV that seems to have been cultivated by a more competent gardener than mine.
We are trained, in academia, in a particular and intricate dialect of self-comparison. The fruit you produce is held up against the fruit produced by every other tree in the forest, and the implicit verdict of every search committee, every reviewer, every annual review is: not enough, not the right kind.
It is the oldest mistake.
It is why a person will sacrifice the beauty of their own garden in search of someone else’s—not because the garden across the fence is actually better, but because the gardener has stopped seeing what is already growing in front of them. They look past the bloom in their own hands. They miss what they have.
And when they finally tear up the garden and chase after the imagined one, they realize too late what they were willing to throw away. The cost of comparison is not just envy. It is the quiet inability to be grateful for the actual life in front of you.
What the ranger said is botanically obvious and, somehow, spiritually radical. The oak is not a failed apple tree. The pine is not a malfunctioning oak. Each one makes the fruit it was built to make. The fruit doesn’t look like the others because it isn’t supposed to.
I watched my son and his classmates take this in without any of the resistance I felt rising in my own chest, and I thought: there is an innocence that gets lost somewhere between eight and forty-one. Somewhere along the way we stop being whatever kind of tree we are.
We start believing we have to fit a particular shape to be worthy of our peers’ attention, and we narrow ourselves to that shape, and then we mistake the narrowing for ambition.
Distraction
Toni Morrison gave a lecture at Portland State University in 1975, “A Humanist View,” in which she said something I keep coming back to, in a context very different from this one.
She was talking about the function of racism in the life of a Black writer, and she diagnosed it, in her characteristic depth, as a type of distraction. Its serious work, she argued, is to keep you explaining yourself, defending yourself, proving over and over that you have a right to your own language, your own art, your own kingdoms. There will always, she said, be one more thing to prove. The point of the demand is never the answer. The point is to keep you from doing the work you are actually here to do.
I will not flatten Morrison’s argument by transferring it casually into this context. She was naming something far graver than the bloodless mechanics of academic comparison, and the two experiences are not equivalent.
But the structural insight she identifies is portable, and I think it is true here. A system that keeps you defending the shape of your fruit, perpetually, will succeed in preventing you from ever simply growing it.
The justification is not the point. The point is the demanding of the justification—the way it consumes the energy that would otherwise have gone into the work. The point is to keep you arguing about your fruit instead of growing it.
And thus, when someone questions why you are writing poetry and short stories when it has nothing to do with your academic job and isn’t required of you—when they tilt their head and ask if it’s really the best use of your time—simply smile and keep writing your poetry and your fiction.
They do not recognize your fruit.
They may never recognize your fruit. That is a fact about them.
It does not have to become a fact about you.
The Clenched Mind
I’ve been reading David Hawkins’s Letting Go this spring, and the book argues that most of what we call stress isn’t actually caused by what’s happening to us. It’s caused by our resistance to what’s happening—the constant, low-grade clenching against what we’re feeling and what we are.
The work, Hawkins says, is to stop fighting.
To let the feeling arrive and let it pass without arguing with it.
Sitting with the ranger’s lesson, and Morrison’s, I realized that comparison is just another word for resistance. The entire enterprise of measuring your fruit against the fruit on the next tree is, at root, a refusal to accept what kind of tree you actually are.
And, the energy that such refusal demands is often called stress.
This is also, I think, why the standard interventions tend to disappoint. We treat stress like a problem of the body—exercise, nutrition, breathwork, massages, the whole apparatus of wellness—and these things help, sometimes a great deal. But they manage the consequences. They do not touch the source.
The source is the mindset. The internal conversation.
The limiting beliefs we never named and never questioned. The emotions we have been suppressing for so long we no longer notice we are doing it. We will not breathe our way out of a comparison habit. We will not run our way out of a refusal to be ourselves.
The clenched mind is not a sharper mind.
It is merely an angrier one.
The Lie of the Summer
As the spring semester ends, here is what I want to offer to my fellow tenure-track readers as we head into summer.
You and I both know the lie of the academic summer. We tell our families it is a break. But we know it is the writing season, the prep season, the catch-up-on-everything-the-semester-stole-from-you season. And, by August, many of us arrive at the fall semester in worse shape than we left the spring.
But grounding is not the reward at the end of the grind.
It is the thing that makes the grind survivable.
And the work you do when you are grounded—when you are no longer trying to produce fruit in the shape of someone else’s tree— is the only work that will ever matter.
For me, this summer, the practice is going to be smaller than I’d like to admit. A walk without my phone. A run around the neighborhood when I would otherwise answer one more email. Permission to keep pushing the poem and the short story forward, in fifteen-minute increments.
A field trip I almost didn’t stay for.
The Quiet Underneath
I think, often now, about the boy in the tent.
He didn’t understand what he was responding to. He just knew that something in him got bigger and softer when the city was a long way off.
I owe him an apology, in a way—for spending so many years thinking he was a phase I’d grown out of, when in fact he had been trying to tell me something I would only learn how to hear at forty-one, in a state park, sitting under an open shelter as a forest ranger explained that the acorn is, and has always been, fruit.
He had figured out, before I had any vocabulary for it, that the real thing isn’t the high, the chase, the praise, the award.
It’s the quiet underneath it all.
The quiet moments in which you can finally see your own fruit, and recognize it, and smile. Because its value lies not in its receipt by others, or its validation through honor and praise.
It is beautiful because it is what it is.
Fruit.
Becoming Full,
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