Your Plot of Ground
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
, Self-Reliance (1841)
Emerson’s claim feels almost violent: imitation is suicide. Not failure, not weakness, but the death of something essential. We might resist this. Haven’t we all learned by imitating? Don’t we stand on the shoulders of others?
But Emerson isn’t condemning influence or learning. He’s pointing to a different danger: the temptation to believe that what others have accomplished relieves us of the need to discover what we ourselves can do. The universe overflows with good work, he acknowledges. Others have tilled their plots beautifully. And yet no nourishment can come to us except through our own labor on our own ground.
The metaphor of the plot is worth sitting with. We don’t choose it. It is “given” to us: our particular temperament, circumstances, obsessions, limitations, the exact configuration of things we notice and things we miss. The ground isn’t necessarily better than anyone else’s. But it’s the only ground where our work can grow.
When powerful new tools appear that can generate and remix and accelerate, the question sharpens: what is the plot of ground that’s actually mine? Not the tasks I can accomplish, but the seeing that only I see, the noticing that only I notice. Emerson closes with a paradox worth carrying: we don’t know what we can do until we have tried. We carry capacities we haven’t discovered, and they reveal themselves only through the toil. Through showing up to our own ground and working it, not knowing in advance what might grow.