A Watermelon Told Me To Quit My Job

We all know the feeling of waking up in the morning dreading the day ahead of us. Our entire culture is based on the idea of “living for the weekend,” but there has to be more than that. I can’t accept a life of being dead from Monday at 9 am until 5 pm on Friday and I don’t want you to either.

Ever since I started gardening, I’ve always said that the garden is my greatest teacher. And yet, she still surprises me every time a deep and valuable life lesson pops up out of the soil. I must have stuck these seeds in the dirt sometime back in June or July, about the same time that I started a new job.

The odds were against us from the start. My partner criticized me for randomly planting seeds and not protecting them from our dogs. The aphids threatened to munch all the foliage away week after week. And by the time the plant was well established enough to start producing flowers (a time I was convinced would never come), the bees were distracted by the basil across the yard.

September came and went. I continued to care for the plant, trimming off half-eaten foliage, watering and fertilizing the soil, telling her I loved her and that she was doing great. Inside I felt like a failure. I was sure that I wasn’t going to get a watermelon this season. The foliage was exploding, but for the longest time, there were no flowers. And no flowers mean no fruit.

I learned online that you can hand-pollinate your plants if you’re concerned that the bees aren’t doing their job properly. I had mixed feelings about this method. It seemed quite unnatural to me and I mean, who am I to say that the bees aren’t doing their job properly?! But I was desperate.

Who’s to say if it was the creepy paintbrush fondling or the bees actually doing their job. A glimpse of hope arrived when I saw a teeny, tiny, fuzzy little watermelon fruit about the size of my pinky nail. Hope is often so fleeting. My vision of future me standing in the yard with watermelon juice dripping from my chin shattered when an uncivilized bird ate the little fruit. Rude as the bird was, it reminded me to keep a closer eye.

I became a little obsessed with this idea of a homegrown watermelon. I went out multiple times a day to check to see if there were any other teeny, fuzzy embryos. Turns out there were quite a few. I googled the heck out of “how to grow a watermelon” and found that one plant will only produce 1–2 healthy melons. It was survival of the fittest.

Every time I went out I thought, “who am I kidding? I’m a first-year gardener, it’s normal not to be successful with everything I plant.” And then I half-jokingly thought, “maybe if I stop looking so hard, a melon will just magically appear.”

October 10th was the best day of 2021 (and maybe my life) for me. I was out minding my own business, half-heartedly checking for surprise melons, when BOOM. I couldn’t believe my eyes, there was a watermelon about the size of my head hiding under all the green foliage. I don’t know the last time I smiled that big. I ran around the yard, I danced, I called my partner out to the garden, I filmed a video for Instagram, I phoned my dad eager to share my joy. There was a party going on inside my soul. There were fireworks, champagne spilling everywhere, and confetti raining down. Best day ever.

A few hours later I got a message in our work chat, “wanna see something cool?” with a photo of a rare plant. I replied, “I’ve got something even cooler” with a photo of my homegrown watermelon that I’d been updating them on for months. No response. Typical.

I got to work the next day, still elated with my accomplishment, and I pretty much received the same response as I did via text the day before. None. My elation faded to discontentment. The feeling that had been quietly festering inside of me was sort of staring up at me like, “you really just gonna let them poop on your parade like that?!” I shrugged it off.

If you know anything about watermelons, you know that I did not harvest that melon on October 10th. If you know a little bit more about watermelons, you know that watermelons only ripen on the vine. Once you cut them off of the vine, that’s as ripe as they’ll get. So here arose the lesson of discernment.

There wasn’t much room for second-guessing, but in old Syd fashion, that’s exactly what I did. I googled almost every day, “how to know when a watermelon is ripe?” I asked several people. I heard that little voice inside of me say, “listen and you will know.” Some days I really felt that. Most days, I rolled my eyes and went back to google.

There was a day when the peer pressure was so great I felt I couldn’t trust myself. I really didn’t think it was ready to pick, but my friends did. I didn’t pick it that day, because I’m stubborn. I picked it the next day when I was all alone so I could convince myself that this was my own decision. As soon as those scissors snipped, I knew I had made a mistake.

I let the melon sit on the counter for about two days so it could continue to ripen (see two paragraphs above) before I cut into it to reveal the truth.

The truth was: the melon wasn’t fully ripe. It was not the deep juicy red I was dreaming of, more of a light red/pink color. It was still absolutely juicy and delicious, but my disappointment over not trusting my gut was spoiling this long-awaited gift. I had imagined hosting a dinner party with all my friends and family and serving nothing but this melon. Sending everyone home hungry and happy.

I sulked for a few days until I saw the real, deep, juicy red lesson the garden had gifted me. A lesson I have learned time and time again. Trust yourself. Trust your gut. Trust your intuition. You already know the answer to your question. Stop outsourcing and source from within. That is where your Truth lies.

Throughout the time I was growing this melon, I started working a new job at a new plant shop. When I started it was one of my dream jobs and I absolutely loved it. It came with a few flaws, but I saw them as opportunities for growth. When the flaws became bigger than my love for plants, I shoved this feeling under the rug. That damn rug!! I wasn’t the right fit for this job and this job was sooo close, but ultimately wasn’t the right fit for me.

That feeling I felt when I cut the watermelon off of the vine and then again when I cut the melon in half was the same feeling quietly festering inside of me at work.

If you wake up in the morning day after day dreading what’s ahead, I urge you to listen to that feeling. Don’t just push through it because you think you have to. The average person spends one-third of their life at work. Add to that one-third of our life sleeping and we’ve only got one tiny little third of living left.

Our culture prioritizes listening to the thinking mind over listening to our bodies or our emotions, but what if we’ve got that backward? Collaborating with the Earth, turning tiny seeds into big fruits, I’ve learned that we do indeed have that backward. The garden teaches that the answers lie within, within ourselves, and within the Earth. Each fruit has one or many seeds that hold all of the information necessary for it to survive and thrive. And so do you.

Thank you watermelon.