Lying fallow can make creative life possible

A fallow field is land that is ploughed by the farmer, which he leaves alone and doesn’t cultivate for a season or more. From ancient times, the understanding is that when the same field is planted over and over, often with the same crop, the nutrients are all depleted from the soil. We could say the land becomes tired; it ends up less fertile.

It yields less or lesser quality produce. But a field that has been allowed to lie fallow for just one year produces a much higher crop yield when it does get planted.

Sometimes, like many productivity focused farmers, we get carried away, working, working, working to produce more and more and more. Then one day, we feel just worn out. We can’t even find the energy to carry on ‘as usual’.


Lying fallow is not to be confused with laziness – it means taking a break from incessant doing; an acknowledgement that the habitual or unimaginative path we have been treading needs some rejuvenation. Over time, the concept of slowing down went from being understood as a valuable regenerative activity to being viewed as a shameful waste. These days, we are bombarded with messages that anyone not visibly producing is not really worthy.

Psychoanalyst Masud Khan gives a slightly different angle in his essay, ‘Lying Fallow’. He talks about the importance of something more than being active and busy searching for answers to our challenges. Sometimes, the more we chase answers, the more they recede. And we foolishly redouble our efforts.

He writes that it is a result of urban civilisation and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. Even when we strive for more and more leisure, we know less and less what to do with it. As a result, we have today the emergence of thriving businesses that offer to organise people’s leisure.

In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels wasteful; even indulgent and selfish.

Yet, if we pause to reflect on this, we realise that Fallow Time is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and art. It is the invisible labour that makes creative life possible.

And those who think that they can’t afford these indulgent breaks, they need to remember that we can all choose short fallow spells – frequent brief ones of a day or days, maybe a week or weeks, a month or months if not a full year – that give us rest and revitalisation and yield rich periods of fertile development.

Poets understood this, and these lines from the Irish poet John O’Donohue offer us the gentle reminder that we tend to resist this most natural and necessary part of the creative process: “This is the time to be slow, Lie low to the wall, Until the bitter weather passes… If you remain generous, time will come good; And you will find your feet, again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind, And blushed with beginning. ”

To do any kind of real work, we need to rest, to read, to replenish, to reconnect. And to know that nothing appears to be happening, because everything is happening.