Offering: May 2023

Beyond easy meanings & low-hanging fruit

Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, King of Swords by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image a person is wearing sky blue, red and a purple cape. They are holding a sword which is pointing straight up. The king is wearing a crown, and there are birds flying overhead among clouds. Behind the card there is a wooden shelf with two houseplants on it.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

I know things need to change. I’ve been fantasizing almost daily about what I’ve decided would be a simpler life. I’ll move to the woods, or do an internship at the barn, or find a shepherd to apprentice with. One of my favorite things to imagine in each case is the way my new life will ground both my writing and my therapeutic work. In my dreams I do less, with more integrity. 

Simplifying fantasies are a bit of a low-hanging fruit for me. They’re easy to grab in a time of stress, minimally disruptive and require little of me creatively, in terms of how I might actually improve my current situation. I’ve been using this phrase “low-hanging fruit” a lot lately. It’s my perhaps uncharitable way of describing an idea that feels good to recite or perform, but lacks the degree of detail that an idea has when it’s closely aligned with reality.

Low-hanging fruits are those ideas that are always sort of floating around in the atmosphere, never far from reach. Temptations in the garden, calling out to be grabbed in a time of uncertainty. One bite gives a sense of “ah yes, this is how it is, I’ve figured it out, I can rest now.” If I’m lost or afraid, nine times out of ten when that fruit calls me, I’m eating it. 

As a kid I used to get irrationally annoyed with people who would say things that felt redundant or obvious. It wasn’t until I spent years reading Tarot that I started to think about the ways over reliance on pervasive and convenient ideas—low-hanging fruit, in other words—can really affect and shape people’s lives.

I’ve sat with and watched hundreds of people perform meanings about themselves that are only questionably aligned with the particulars of their lives, saying things like “I am this kind of attached,” or “I know that until I do x I’ll never be y,” or leaning so much on a political or spiritual discourse that their own relationship to the forces they’re talking about gets grown over and hard to locate, let alone touch.

Observing other people do this has had no effect on how often I do it myself. If anything, it’s pointed the way to hundreds more acres of low-hanging fruit to grab in my own times of uncertainty than I would’ve have had access to, otherwise. When my circumstances start to feel like they’re changing faster than I can keep up with, I’ll be the first in line with a basket at the easy-pick fruit orchard. If an idea feels true in a moment like that, count me in. 

If you read these Offerings regularly you may know I’ve been studying narrative therapy this year. One of the things we do in narrative therapy is pay attention to the discourses we’re in that yield assumptions, expectations and biases that don’t necessarily align with our unique experiences but aren’t immediately visible and so often go unquestioned. I’ve been attending to the way it feels when I’m reciting an idea over and over again that has me more than I have it, wondering about where it comes from, and who benefits. 

Psychologist Rachel Hare-Mustin defines discourses as sustaining particular worldviews. They illuminate some things and obscure others, and can manifest as popular ways of talking about and acting on “a common, shared viewpoint,” which are part of how a given discourse is sustained (1994). Discourses ensure that low-hanging fruits—which can offer a sense of certainty, security and belonging—are plentiful. 

I’ll give an example. I’m a social worker who has worked in the mental health field for more than a decade which means that no matter how critical I might like to think of myself as being, I am deeply embedded in pathologizing discourses. When I have a problem in my life, like being overwhelmed or too busy which is currently the case, there’s an immediate impulse to call what I’m doing something like avoidance or dysfunctional or a coping strategy. Always with the implication that it’s maladaptive. 

These are end-cap words. They’re right there, convenient to grab and require little imagination for me. They help me make sense of my overwhelm by saying it’s motivated by unprocessed grief or pain or some other aversive internal experience that I must not have the tools or awareness to deal with otherwise. 

It can feel good in a moment to call it these things because they’re concepts I have a lot of familiarity with and a sense of know-how around, even if I don’t always apply what I know. I’m sure there’s also some truth in them.

But higher up on the tree there are fruits that remind me, man, I really love what I do. And I say yes a lot because a lot of the stuff that comes up really is a full-body hell yes. My eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to creative work.

I may not go for that particular fruit when I’m reaching for meaning about the overwhelm in part because I have a lot less of a feel for what to do with this way of thinking about things. There’s some discourse around competence in there, maybe; that if I’m not competent in better negotiating the incredibly privileged experience of loving my work as much as I do, well that’s not okay. So I shouldn’t try. 

On other areas of the tree beyond low-hanging ideas about avoidance and coping, there are other fruits making excellent points about my questionable relationship with time and why I feel the need to cram five years’ worth of work into six months. 

Again, I didn’t learn anything in graduate school about energetics of or relationships to time, so that’s another one I might be inclined to pass over despite the possibility that it may actually be more true. So while they may be initially less comforting, I see both of these higher-up fruits as worth the trouble to go for and to grapple with some.

To be clear I don’t think an idea being common or a fruit being low-hanging makes it wrong or less quality. I do think the low-hanging fruits in my own life have sometimes been limiting. I see what they give me: A safe feeling of getting it, even a sense of belonging. Important things. They nestle me up next to wise therapists in tv shows, overextended women in my family, other self-identified control freaks or codependents or anxiously attached wild women or whatever, plus a whole world of others eating fruits saying similar things in solidarity. 

But if I’m going to take a low fruit, I want to do so by choice and with an awareness that there’s a whole tree’s worth of fruit out beyond it. Maybe under-harvested fruits, maybe tougher to reach and harder yet to digest. But not less accessible if I’m willing and able to seek them, and possibly more true. 

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

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Sources

Hare-Mustin, R. (1995). Discourses in the mirrored room: A postmodern analysis of therapy. Family Process, 33(1), 19-35.