Reaping What I Sowed after Many Years of Farming - Who knows where the great harvest goes!?

I use this column as a space to write down the bits and pieces of my dreams that lay deep within the depths of my mind as if I were staring at a revolving lantern. I usually don’t read my articles again after posting them nor do I remember what I have written. However, I know that many readers look forward to reading my column “Sleep talking nonsense”, so I’m grabbing my pen and taking one step forward again today keeping the old adage of “persistence pays off” in mind.

One time, I happened to own a land full of overgrown weeds. At first glance, the land looked like an untameable jungle, but I decided to get out my plow and work this land that I had acquired. I then prepared seeds and planted them one by one with my own hands, hoping that one day I’d be able to harvest some crops. So many people laughed at me. They believed that a man who doesn’t even have experience keeping houseplants alive would be utterly useless in a weedy field. Still, I hoped that I could make something out of this land and I just kept going.

What do you think happened next? The field began to unbelievably look like a farm in an unexpectedly short period of time. Then people started to notice and offered to plant seeds with me, expecting me to share my harvest. I thought to myself, “Wow, my farming could be the real thing!” and I worked harder and kept sowing seeds.

However, as the number of people participating in seed sowing increased, there were some who didn’t know how hard the work would be and soon grew tired of it. These people left immediately after taking a bite from the harvested crops. Some people even trampled the field that had been so neatly tended to. I often wondered why they would do such a terrible thing. There were others who became greedy and started to expect more food, so they went to try their hand at farming another field on their own. That too was rather painful to watch.

Still, the sowing continued. The number of helping hands kept increasing, and the field became full of people. Then I looked carefully to find that some of the workers did not want to sow seeds, but only wanted to collect the harvested crop. It is important to work together to sow seeds and share the hardship of harvesting, but shockingly, they didn’t want to experience hard work and they stopped as soon as they got their hands dirty. It’s a shame when people miss the opportunity to work in a fruitful field that could have brought them great excitement and joy if they had only put in the effort.

In the meantime, time was catching up with me and it was getting harder and harder for my legs and back to continue farming. Still, more and more people asked for the harvest, and I just wished to somehow continue farming with stronger passion than I ever had before. After all, this was a job that I had to do myself. Once I got to work, I could not sit still until harvesting crops was over. My heart jumps when I imagine good results until I harvest the last of the crops.

While I was working hard in the field and getting my hands dirty in the mud, I noticed that there are three types of people among the workers I worked with; The first type is the person who only wants the harvest and he doesn’t care about anything else other than getting a reward at the end. The second type is a person who is passionate about farming, but this person cares too much about what others may think and he’s too wrapped up in his own business. This type’s actions just don’t correspond with his thoughts and he ends up not being able to get the results because he doesn’t even know how to get started in a muddy field. The third type is the person who works hard together with others to sow the seeds. He always stays passionate and he helps through to the end when we harvest the final crop. It is always a pleasure to have friends who are this type, regardless of their background.

No matter who or how people help, once we see the fruits of our labor in the field, we can’t easily abandon it because many people are looking forward to taking home some crops from that field and it brings them a lot of joy. This is why I continue to farm and work hard for the harvest. It doesn’t matter if there are helping hands or not. Once a field has been cultivated and seeds have been sown to produce good quality crops, the field must be carefully maintained.

There is no way for me to know out of the people who work with me who will be able to take over my duties and work hard to cultivate this field to produce magnificent results in the future. Farming is intensive work, but the fact that there are people who are eager to see the crops produced from this field are surely a great source of encouragement. If there are one or two more people who share this feeling, this field will never return to being that sad weedy jungle again. Rather, maybe one day a wealthy landowner may appear and will want to buy it. If that happens, the life of workers in this field will surely become richer. Moreover, not only will they be able to continue to happily work in the field, but they may even own their own fields someday.

These days my entire body now creaks after years of working with a sickle in the field. I am amazed at how long I have been doing it. Patience was crucial, and even though everybody despised me, I stuck to my heart and I continued to work so hard. My body may be worn out, but my heart cannot be happier! My patience still endures. Maybe it’s because I’m just an outsider to this profession, but I never intend to spend the rest of my life in the fields. My farming will eventually come to an end. For now, no one knows what the future holds for this field.