Give Me All the Plums

A reminder to let life show us what it can be

Photo by Nadeykina Evgeniya on Unsplash

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

~William Carlos Williams

I first encountered the above poem in a Poetry 101 class, one of three classes that fundamentally changed how I saw the world (the other two were Intro to Ethics, which challenged every belief I’d been exposed to at that point, and a class on formal logic where I fell in love with proofs, argumentation, and validity).¹ Although I was maybe only 16 years old when I last read this poem, I can still effortlessly recall the words today. They come to mind whenever I read or hear someone trying to tell others who and what they are.

Aside from playing around with rhymes, poetry never interested me. I lacked the emotional maturity to connect with the poems I encountered and resisted what I felt were efforts to nudge me into the humanities. “Fine,” I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the only English class that fit into my schedule one quarter. “I’ll suffer through this embarrassing junk and never take a lit class again.”

“This Is Just To Say” was one of the first poems we read. It was deceptively simple and line by line, sound by sound, my teacher peeled back layers of meaning to reveal a hidden world. I stepped through space to occupy the emotional state of a single moment suspended in time – a moment made up of so much more than just plums and iceboxes. Sound and word and image and choice and meaning came together and suddenly, I understood why poetry makes such an indelible impact on culture.

That was my first lesson in letting the world show itself to me rather than telling the world what I believed it to be. I learned that if I looked closely, methodically, and curiously, I could perhaps step into an entirely different world – one I had never known existed.

I later extended the lesson to include people and still later discovered that this is the ethos of research. We strive to uncover the truth of the world and to do so, we must leave space for the world to speak to us. Otherwise, we risk shoving it into some pre-defined truth that obscures what really is. Deductive reasoning can only get you so far.

As you might imagine, this simple notion is often deeply threatening to many. Whether ideologues or believers or members or adherents, so many seek to tell us how the world is and who people are without leaving space for either to show us otherwise. “It’s common sense,” they might say, as though it weren’t once common sense to protest heliocentrism and defend a flat earth. Or “God says it,” as though God is limited to a book or a man or a thought. This is a failure of imagination.

And that is the lesson I want to recall this week: to let life show me what it is, what it can be, and to stop forcing it into the limits of my imagination.

I want to take leaps of faith and live in a way I wouldn’t have ever allowed myself to live before – without guarantees, without three layers of additional security, without backups to hedge my risk. Or at least without organizing my entire life around those elements.

I want to say yes, to create space for people and relationships to show me what they will be and for life to draw me in one direction or another.

I want to eat plums and savour their sweetness, now, because I don’t know whether life will give me any more. And rather than trust that I’m entitled to more, I want to simply take what is within reach. Life might show me that it can be sweet, if I let it.

1. Incidentally, the three classes that permanently altered how I saw the world were all delivered at a community college. I went on to attend classes at universities, some prestigious, but none affected me as these did. This, too, is a small lesson on not drawing premature conclusions about people or places or ideas or anything else and instead letting them speak for themselves.