How to thrive and be most productive in the harvest season of life?
I grew up in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, one of the nation’s richest agricultural areas. This is the land of promise that the pioneers on the Oregon Trail were trying to reach (if they didn’t first die of dysentery!).
Summertime, and early fall, was the season of harvest. As a youngster my family had a farm with livestock, hay, and orchards. The rhythms of planting and harvest were something I knew from a young age. As a young teenager in the late 1960s and early 70s, picking strawberries, cherries, and green beans on nearby farms was a rite of passage.
Our church youth group caught chickens for a local farmer as a fundraiser (you know that chicken you buy at the store? Someone has to get them from the barns into the trucks for processing…). I suppose catching chickens was a type of “harvest,” although it could take place any time of year.
The Season of Harvest
Many today may have a hard time even connecting with what harvest means.
As more people today are more distanced from agrarian roots and settings, the harvest season may have less significance. For many of us these days, “harvest” means gathering up produce and other items at the grocery store.
Thanksgiving Day in the USA is the fourth Thursday of November. Traditionally it is meant to celebrate and give thanks for the harvest, and for other blessings in our lives.
In Canada, the Thanksgiving holiday is in October. Having it earlier and more connected with the actual harvest season always made more sense to me. But I’m glad to have a day set aside for giving thanks just the same.
There is a season for harvest, just as for sowing and cultivating.
This is true not only with agrarian cycles, but also metaphorically with our lives.
See my earlier post, Your Life as Seasons of a Year, for an overall perspective on this.
In that post, I compared people from infancy to their 20’s as being in the springtime of life. I compared those in their late 20s to 40s/50s as being in the “summer” of life.
And those in their late 40s through their 60s could be considered as in the early fall to full Autumn of their lives.
Often, we associate fall/autumn with harvest, although much of the harvest begins to take place in the summer. Early crops sooner than that, of course, but many crops are gathered in late summer and early fall. Mid to late autumn then is a time for reflecting on the harvest just past, and giving thanks for its blessings.
Are you living in the season of harvest? If you’re in midlife, as many of my readers are, then likely this does reflect your season of life.
Principles for the season of harvest
The midlife years of 40s to 60s may be a rewarding season of seeing the fruit of your life up to that point.
In these years, you have established yourself with the foundation of decisions made when you were younger. This may include your education, your career, and your relationships (family, friends, professional). Your midlife status will also incorporate your reputation, character, and overall influence.
Springtime and early summer is the time for sowing, planting, and cultivating. These can be exciting and challenging years, when most of a lifetime looms ahead. Younger adults are still making those foundational decisions. Everything is directed toward building a future.
In the midlife years…
…and increasingly in the later years, the attention shifts from a focus on the future, toward attention to the present.
At some point, in the winter of life, there is little left in terms of “future,” which allows (or requires) elderly people to increasingly live in the present, in the moment.
In midlife, there is a bit of both. You’ve lived long enough so that the future doesn’t seem quite as endless as it once did, and because of that you’re more able to live in the present. There comes an awareness that our days and years are precious, and not without limit.
This positions you for the season of harvest in your life.
You can engage in a harvest of benefits for yourself, and for the benefit of others. The season of planting and cultivating is for the most part past. Now is the time to begin to gather in what you’ve sown.
What might harvest time in our lives look like?
If you’ve been married for 20 or 30 years, you can harvest the benefits of a mature relationship. Together, you’ve gone through things that can bond two people like no other. The power of years of shared experience is strong. You’ve been through the adjustments of the early years, weathered challenging financial situations, raised children together, experienced loss. Now is a time to reap benefits of this mature relationship, and be a blessing to one another and to others.
While these things can bond a relationship, they can also strain some relationships to the breaking point. I get it, and am casting no shame. If that has been your experience, the challenges and even the pain of that story are part of your harvest season as well. Everything that you are, and all that you have experienced, is part of your story and can contribute to the harvest season.
Further along that line, perhaps there are ways that you feel like you made poor decisions when you were younger. Planting poorly, or failing to plant when needed, might have brought you to a point at midlife where it is hard to harvest something positive from them. All of us have made mistakes and have regrets. There is no shame in that either, especially if we don’t let past mistakes define us entirely. If this is your experience, harvest where you can. Realize that even some of our mistakes can yield life’s greatest lessons. Learn from those, and bring your experience to bear for the benefit of others.
There is a saying…
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start from where you are and change the ending.” This is true for all of us, regardless of our past. And consider that even in midlife, there is still time to plant “late crops” that may yield a harvest sometime in a later season.
If you have children, likely at this point they are grown or nearly so. By the 40’s and 50s, most people with children have experienced the empty nest, or soon will. This is an especially rewarding time to “harvest” the relationship with your adult children, that you have spent so many years nurturing. You’re no longer “raising” them, cultivating–now you can simply enjoy the harvest of shared time with your sons and daughters. More than likely, they are in their own season of planting and cultivating. Part of the harvest season for you is being there for them in the challenges they face, providing wisdom and support, and resources as necessary.
In this season of life, many of you will become grandparents as well, which is in some ways the ultimate type of harvest season. You don’t have the burden of “raising” the grandchildren, at least not in the way their parents do. This frees you to spend your time in the moment with them. Enjoy the harvest.
More ways to harvest in midlife…
You’ve probably reached a “seasoned” point in your vocation or professional life. You’ve gained experience, wisdom, and skills that can be passed on to others. You may feel less pressure to move up the ladder and more freedom to reap what you’ve sown. More freedom to invest yourself into the lives of others, or to provide to others whatever is the benefit of your craft.
For some of you, the harvest might be in exerting your influence in new ways. Perhaps being a mentor, a consultant, or coach to someone. Or focusing on creating content and not just consuming it.
One of the lessons of these middle years is how fast they seem to go.
No longer do you think just in terms of the passing of years. It starts to feel more like five or ten years can fly by, and you wonder what just happened.
One of the most important aspects of harvest, is recognizing the season for it. If not harvested at the right time, a crop can pass its peak. It can become overripe, fall to the ground, or otherwise be less than what it should be. The key is to recognize the moment for harvest, and not miss it.
In our lives, let’s not miss the chances for harvest. If you are in midlife, this is your season, this is your time to harvest. You’ve spent many years sowing and cultivating, building toward these years. Don’t let them slip by and find yourself in the winter of life, wishing you had lived the moment, wishing you had reaped the harvest. To be sure, the harvest can continue throughout the rest of our lives. It may look different in the winter of our lives, when we may lack the health or means to focus on the harvest as much as we can in the midlife years.
So now is the time. The harvest of your life is ready and waiting–don’t miss it…
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Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/harvest
https://www.etymonline.com/word/harvest
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/harvest
Steger, M. F. (2009). Meaning in life. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds.), Oxford library of psychology. Oxford handbook of positive psychology (p. 679–687). Oxford University Press.
