Hidden in a small bog circled by pines one afternoon this week, I stooped again and again to pick cranberries. It was slow going at first; the fruit plunked onto the bottom of my plastic container. Perhaps it was not despair, but with a sense of foreboding that the outing would be a failure — a fear that I would never gather enough to matter. Call this the clam-digging effect.
The clam-digging effect is this: Often when one begins raking, there are none to be found. Yet after a while, you scratch up one, then another, and another. Eventually you have to pull yourself away. “But, just one more,” you think. Your clam bag gets full, and you don’t know what to do with them all once you get home. It is the same with berrying.
The key, it seems to me, is to think about other things, let the mind drift, let the hands do the work. The moment you stop fretting if you will find anything at all, success is at hand. The lesson here is to stop worrying. Worrying slows time and interrupts the action. For me, sailing has the same effect, keeping my hands busy enough to keep my mind in the present.
I was speaking with a long-distance swimmer recently who told me about how she has full conversations with herself as the miles pile up, better, I think, than focusing on how far she has left to go.
The sun was low in the west as I picked, slanting in such a way so the cranberries lit up in the yellowing light. I found a rhythm, gathering six berries in my hand before slipping them in with the rest. By the time the sun was beneath the horizon, I had nearly a gallon. Thoughts of Thanksgiving dinner came only when I was on the drive home.