A Fallow Season
A childhood cornfield explains a grown-up need: seasons of rebuilding. Career, relationships, information, body, each has its own soil, and each can be restored.
The walk to school
I walked through the cornfield on my way to elementary school for years, always looking forward to the first school days in August when the stalks were high enough to hide me as I cut through.
Then one year, something completely different came up. After planting, the spring growth in the field looked wild, almost abandoned.
“Huh,” I remember thinking. “Did they sell the land?”
I finally asked my parents if they’d heard whether the farmer had sold the cornfield.
“No,” they said. “They planted alfalfa. You know, the fallow season.”
I did not know.
Fallow season explained
My parents explained that every so often, when a farmer had adequate reserves and enough other fields to harvest, they would plant alfalfa and let a field go fallow. No fertilizing. No tending. No harvesting. Instead, they let the alfalfa go completely to seed. Then, the following spring, they would plow the field and till the spent plants into the soil.
The subsequent harvests in the years after that were often especially strong.
Fallow is a season of rebuilding.
Agronomists say the same thing in scientific terms. Fertilizer can spike plant-available nutrients fast and can boost microbial activity in the near term. Over longer horizons, though, the soil’s slower variables decide what’s real: carbon, structure, nitrogen that stays put in fallowed fields. Soil responds better to rebuilding cycles than to continuous chemical input, and fallowing is more effective in the long-term for building deep, enduring soil health and structure.
A fallow season also changes the water math, increasing soil water storage and reducing irrigation pressure. It can raise the net economics too, through reduced losses and reduced stress.
Environmentally, practices which reduce nutrient loss pathways, runoff, leaching, and volatilization also reduce downstream harm compared with heavy, continuous inputs. Fallow, done intelligently, is one way a system stops bleeding.
Time for renewal is systems maintenance. Rebuilding practices work on the slow variables: soil carbon, nitrogen retention, water storage, and loss pathways like leaching and runoff. Over time, those slower variables decide whether yield is stable or brittle.
I’ve been thinking about it lately, how many of us could use a fallow season.
Depletion has categories, and each category has its own type of soil to nourish. There are several ways we can apply a fallow season to our daily lives:
- Career fallow: a season where output is deliberately de-optimized so judgment, curiosity, and direction can come back online.
- Relationship fallow: reduction of social acreage to stop nutrient loss to performative, extractive ties.
- Information fallow: cutting input volume so synthesis, signal extraction, and doctrine formation can resume.
- Body fallow: rebuilding baseline capacity, sleep depth, strength, gait, appetite. The physical substrate of agency.
Career, relationships, information, body. Each has its own soil, and each can be restored.
Career fallow
Career fallow is often misunderstood, mostly because the modern workplace treats output as proof of worth. In Beyonce's words, the quip "What have you done for me lately," is the mantra of the corporate workplace.
I haven’t had many in-between seasons in my career, but in one job, after the first year, something became automatic. I started taking a forty-minute yoga class nearby during lunch. I stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria and grazed all day from my desk instead. I used lunch hour for flexibility, breath, and strength.
That year, my work got done, easily, and yet I built reserves, which gave me something I could spend later. When I started graduate school at MIT the following year, I felt the difference. The work was hard, and it asked for grit. Looking back, that yoga year wasn’t a detour. It was soil nourishment of the best kind.
Career fallow, at its core, is the decision to reduce harvest pressure long enough for your deeper instruments to recalibrate. Judgment. Curiosity. Appetite for hard problems. Tolerance for ambiguity. Those capacities get strip-mined first when a role turns into a perpetual response cycle.
From the outside, career fallow can look like underemployment, such as taking a different role to give yourself a pivot. It can even look like irresponsibility, especially to observers who only recognize you when you’re producing. Inside, it feels different. It feels like relief from forced urgency. It feels like long-range thinking returning. It feels like the moment you stop optimizing for what is demanded and start optimizing for what is true.
This kind of fallow requires reserves. Money matters, but so does psychological stamina, the willingness to be temporarily illegible to people who only know how to measure you by throughput.
When career fallow works, the gains compound. You don’t just recover. You often change crops. If it’s only retreat, it won’t restore anything. It will only buy time.
A simple test is this: does the season increase your future optionality without requiring a dramatic identity performance today? If yes, it’s fallow.
Relationship fallow
Relationship fallow is simpler to describe, and harder to do.
Most people treat relationships like fixed-crop acreage. The same obligations, the same conversational grooves, year after year. But social life has its own form of soil depletion, especially when the pattern is performative. When you are constantly managing someone else’s comfort, constantly explaining yourself, constantly shrinking your language to prevent friction, you are exporting nutrients.
Relationship fallow is the decision to stop planting in exhausted ground for a while. Not as punishment or moral judgment, rather as energy conservation.
I’ve had relationships drift for a season, and then return with new air in them. There were new stories to tell, adventures to chase. There was room for curiosity. Sometimes distance isn’t decay. Sometimes it’s rotation; the drift can be purposeful when a relationship begins to feel like a rut.
Relationship fallow can be as small as refusing certain recurring conversations. It can be as large as stepping away from a whole circle that only knows how to relate to your previous identity. The signal is usually obvious. You feel tired after contact, not because intimacy is hard, but because the relationship requires you to metabolize distortion.
In fallow, you reduce the constantly-tended acreage. Fewer check-ins. Fewer updates. Less social compliance. You let some connections go to seed, meaning you let them exist without harvesting reassurance or grooming them for immediate emotional yield.
Relationships which are mainly performance contracts collapse when you stop feeding them. If a relationship is real, it survives a fallow season of low output or outreach.
Information fallow
Information fallow combats overgrazing. When your mind becomes a task board, a fallow season can restore your attention span and capacity to think.
The internet turns your attention into chopped machine-feed. You can consume an astonishing volume of information and still become cognitively malnourished, because the input is not structured for synthesis. It is structured for engagement.
There are times I’ve decided, for months at a time, to read physical books, to write, to take walks on work breaks instead of scrolling or shopping online. The first thing that returns is quiet. The second is something more valuable: the ability to integrate.
Information fallow means lowering intake so your internal composting system can work. Many people can take in. They cannot integrate. They can react. They cannot build doctrine.
In practice, information fallow is often a few simple constraints: no news grazing, no “just checking,” fewer hot takes, more rereading, more time between input and opinion. It’s the return of your own sentences.
It is building the conditions under which you can separate noise from signal again.
Body fallow
Body fallow is the most literal, and the most politically charged, because it collides with the worship of productivity.
Bodies don’t just get tired. They get depleted. Sleep becomes shallow. Strength erodes. Small aches become chronic. Appetite dulls or spikes. You stop walking well. You stop breathing well. Your nervous system narrows into a corridor of tolerance.
Body fallow is the season where you stop negotiating with that depletion. You rebuild baseline capacity as infrastructure. If agency is the theme, the body is the hardware.
For me, body-fallow looks like saunas and yoga a few days a week, walking every day, better food, more regular sleep. It looks like less adrenaline. Less arguing, and less listening to people who argue for a living. Less late-night screen light. Less self-betrayal disguised as discipline.
The goal is not performance. The goal is fertility and energy abundance.
A day off from eating can be a mini-fallow, as autophagy is the body's calibrating and prioritizing, choosing which cells to invest in and which to delete.
When the body comes back online, everything else gets easier. Thinking clears. Emotions become more proportional. Decisions feel less forced. Your tolerance for complexity returns.
Encouragement
Fallow can be scary. To decide and declare you're doing something differently, resting the soil, a reset.
For me, every time I have taken a fallow season, the replenishment served me far better more than powering on ever would have.
— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul
Madonna Demir
If you want to stay in your current role, read Through the Fog next
