The Tree You Plant

I was driving my 87-year-old mother-in-law back to the memory care facility where she currently lives, and we were talking about selling her house, which is sitting empty but on which she is still paying taxes. She agreed it was probably time to sell it, though it was a hard decision for her. She loved the house.

“I feel like I’m giving up a part of myself,” she said. “You live your whole life, you do all these things, and then you have nothing to show for it.”

I understood why she would feel that way, but I also knew it was inaccurate. I told her that while she wouldn’t a have a statue built in her honor or a wing of a hospital named after her, she affected more people than she could even imagine. She’d never know how she touched all the children she met while worked at the high school, the co-workers she delighted, to say nothing of her daughters and how their lives and their children’s lives were branches off a tree she had planted. Her impact on the world goes on and on, and yet from where she sat in my car on the way to Ida Culver House in Greenwood in Seattle, it was very hard to see.

I don’t know if it helped, but I was glad I said it. I was speaking from experience, of course. You publish a book, which seems like the sort of thing you can point to and say, “There, I did that.” Yet, what you point to is hardly anything. As an object, it’s not much more than a paperweight. Its value, its effect, is largely unseen and unheard, residing as it does in the hearts of readers you will likely never meet or hear from.

But that value resides in your heart as well. When you’re feeling as if all this writing is for nothing, when it seems like everything sent out to the world disappears like smoke in an empty forest, go back to the source. What you experienced writing a story is a reflection of what a reader experienced reading it. You may not be able to see or hear that connection, but it’s there just the same, the tree you planted both for yourself and for the world you love.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com