Growing Strawberries - on being who you want to be even when it’s difficult

I currently live not too far from the coast in Northern California. I don’t know the statistics on this, but we grow a tremendous amount of the strawberries that supply the United States. I’ve seen this first hand when visiting family in Western Virginia. All the strawberries sold at their local Sam’s club (essentially the same as Costco) were grown about 30 minutes from my house, in Watsonville California. The right mix of humidity and temperature and soil make this THE place to grow strawberries. I’ve seen them, acres and acres, growing plump, over soil covered in vast plastic sheets (to protect the delicate berries from pests and bacteria), luxuriating in the mild sun and fog near the coast.

What does this have to do with being the kind of person you want to be in life? Everything. Let’s talk about the right environment for growing strawberries.

This came up in a counseling session with one of the teens I’ve worked with.

The environments we live our lives in impact us in significant and generally unacknowledged ways. The schools we attend, the workplaces we spend our days in, the families we share our homes with, the other communities we associate with. We can set ourselves up for success by choosing to be in and building communities that support us in being the kind of person we want to be.

Back to strawberries, though. She had been acting not like the kind of person who she wanted to be lately. I was working with her during that challenging year of pandemic isolation, and she’d just completed her freshman year of highschool from her bedroom. COVID had been hard on everyone, and especially for school aged children who had already spent more than a year doing school from their own bedrooms, their school lives converted to computer screen communities.

We were discussing the fall, returning to classes in person. In this case, she was also switching to a new, smaller independent school. We had identified values and goals that were important to her. The kind of person she wanted to be. The sort of student she wanted to be. The role model and mentor she wanted to be. We acknowledged how it had been difficult to be that kind of person lately given all the pressures and changes of pandemic life. There was an ease and optimism to the session, an excitement and enthusiasm about being in a new environment in the fall where it would hopefully be easier to be the kind of person she wanted to be. My heart rejoiced for a student who truly wanted to understand deeply and inspire others, who’d struggled in one school where it felt hard to approach learning that way, who now felt hopeful and energized about her future again.

So, yes, on the one hand, when you can choose, choose the sort of environment that supports you in being the kind of person you want to be, in doing the kinds of things that you want to do.

But, it is possible to grow strawberries in the desert. Have you ever seen that movie, the Martian, where the astronaut gets stranded on Mars and grows potatoes to survive?

There is a special joy to sticking by your values and being the kind of person you want to be especially when it is difficult to do so–When the environment stacks the deck against you. There is a determination and strength in building the greenhouse and creating the right conditions to grow strawberries, even in the desert. And it is all the sweeter precisely because it is so hard.