How the Thing That’s Annoyed You for Years May Be What You Need the Most

The Plums in the Icebox

In eighth grade English class, I was introduced to a very short poem called “This is just to say” by William Carlos Williams. The poem is a note that someone left for someone else about plums they ate from an icebox.

Ever since the day I read it, that poem has stuck with me, and not in a good way—until recently.

It’s a very simple poem. Someone writes a note to a partner or friend apologizing for eating all the plums in the icebox and briefly describes how delicious the plums were. What annoyed me was that someone would take the time to write a poem about such a trivial little interaction between two people. It also annoyed me that the poem talked about the taste of the plums, about them being so juicy and so cold.

When I would read the poem, I could actually feel and taste the juiciness of the plums. I’d come to find out that sensory experience was part of what made the poem bother me for so many years.

For years I wondered: Why was this little poem that I disliked still in my head all this time? 

Decades later I realized why the poem had stuck with me, nagging at me all this time: The poem described what I needed most.

For most of my life, I believed that the physical world was arbitrary, and that the only truly interesting place to work and play was in the world of pure information. Forget all that stuff about matter and energy, I thought; information and theory is where it’s at! Why would anyone write about eating a plum or even take the time to actually really taste a plum?

My insistence on staying out of the physical world was evident in my college major of computer science. I was drawn to computer science because it deals in information (in fact, in its pure form, computer science has nothing to do with computers or science). I despised the electrical engineering classes that I was forced to take as part of my major. I hated anything that dealt with physical constraints or what I felt were arbitrary aspects of the world.

I would joke with my friends who majored in materials science. I’d knock on different surfaces and pretend to measure their coefficients by their sound. Knock, knock on the table: “Hmmm, that’s 0.39.” Knock, knock on the wall: “That one’s 0.471.” It felt like all the engineering majors spent so much time dealing with arbitrary things.

At an even deeper level, in my distaste for the physical world there was a denial of existing in this world as a human. Of course, if you asked me whether I was a member of the homo sapiens species I’d say “yes” and I’d believe it, but I treated that as just another arbitrary fact just like the coefficient of friction on some material we happened to find on the earth.

The one part I did always accept about being human was that I have a conscious mind. I felt that it wasn't that I have a mind, I felt that I am my mind. My body was there just to carry around my mind.

While I was living in this way, I didn’t know I was denying my full bodied humanity. Like many of our deepest underlying beliefs, we can’t see them because they are part of the unconscious operating system that our conscious self runs on top of.

When I became a coach, it became very important and useful to deeply understand how humans work. And how humans can reach their maximum potential and fulfillment, including helping them identify and move past blockers that were in the way.

I plunged into deep, often intense, experiential education about how humans work, which included both understanding others and doing deep inner work on myself. As I did this deep work with myself and others, I realized how I’d been unconsciously denying my full humanity and denying truly being in this physical world. I also realized how inhibiting denying those had been.

I realized I was living my life only in my head. Disconnected from my body. Living in one’s head is rather common with people in software engineering and related careers. When you live in your head, you get really good at being there and get really good at thinking. (And, unfortunately, overthinking and anxiety often comes along with that.)

Now I understand what people mean by “get into your body” and out of your head. Getting into my body reduces anxiety and makes me present. I can now better feel and listen to my body and the information and wisdom it has. Being able to connect and notice things in your body helps you understand what emotions you’re experiencing, which drive how you feel and the choices you make. By connecting with and working on the body as well as the mind, deeper and faster positive change becomes possible.

The poem’s focus on the sensory experience of plums connects to all this as well. I was annoyed at someone getting so much pleasure from something as simple as a plum. Pleasure, I thought, should only come from dealing with very advanced mental concepts and ideas, and not from the five senses. But now I see how tuning into your senses unlocks so much pleasure and enjoyment of life. (As I am writing this now, I just made a post-it note: “Taste the plum!”)

The poem also captures a seemingly mundane piece of human-to-human connection. Those small interactions with someone else, those tiny moments of minutiae, contain an incredible amount of magic. When you start to see and experience the fullness of that magic, life becomes much richer. The mundane can be profound when you see it in the right way.

How You Can Use This

My hope is that my personal journey with this poem can be useful to you in some way. The lessons this poem was trying to teach me may or may not be lessons that are valuable to you.

The questions to ask yourself are: What has been annoying me in the back of my mind for years? What might that thing be trying to teach me? What might I be able to learn from the fact that it’s been stuck in my mind?

It may be that that thing is trying to tell you what you need the most (like the poem did for me) or it might be a different kind of lesson. Sit with the notion that there might be something important about this annoying thing and notice what comes up.

You may be wondering, how can I tell whether something that annoys me is something I can learn from or whether it’s simply just something that annoys me? The key is whether it annoys you when it’s not present in your life. For example, you may be annoyed by a saying that so many people use and love. If that saying only bothers you when you read it or someone else says it, it’s less likely there is a big lesson there. But if that saying bothers you even when you don’t see or hear it, yet it’s continuously or periodically stuck in your mind, that’s where there may be some gold to mine.