The Acorns Not the Valley0:00/335.07265306122451×

Trees. You've heard of them.

Transcript:

So I'm at the, uh, beginning of season five right now of Midnight Burger. Uh, for those of you who don't know, I don't write everything first. And then we do the show. I get about an episode and a half to two episodes ahead of the show, and I keep writing and we start producing right about then. So we're kind of at the beginning of things right now and, uh, right now.

I'm having this feeling where I'm at the beginning of the season and I'm looking at the end of the season and it's just such a distant mark. You know, like looking at the Empire State Building from Queens, and it could be a little daunting sometimes. Like there's so much, so much writing to do between where I am now and where we'll be then, and it's just.

It's a lot to take in sometimes and it's a lot to take on sometimes.

There's this short story called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's by Jean Gno. It was written in, um, uh, the 1950s and it was turned into an animated short in the eighties and it won the Academy Award. And it's a story of this. Hiker who is hiking through the, uh, sort of foothills of the Alps. And he finds himself in a really desolate valley.

And there's only one man who lives there. And he starts to get to know this man, this man's a shepherd. And he asks the man why he's living there. And the man says that he wants to transform the valley into a beautiful place. And he says, but you're one guy. And he says, I know every day.

The man takes his sheep out to graze, and at the bottom of his shepherd staff, he has an iron spike and he drives the iron spike into the ground and he reaches into his pocket. He takes an acorn and he puts the acorn in the hole. And he does that several times a day, every day when he takes his sheep out.

And so the man, the hiker who encounters this man, he says, oh, okay. Well I, good luck. I guess the hiker goes off to fight in World War I and gets pretty screwed up as many people did by World War I. And he returns to the valley and he sees that. Over the years, there are now saplings growing things are actually happening, and the man who plants the acorns, he has stopped taking care of sheep because the sheep are eating the saplings.

And now he is a beekeeper. And so the man heals, uh, of his. Of his war wounds there in this uh, valley that's starting to grow. And then he returns again several years later to see that the landscape has been transformed and about 10,000 people live there, and there's a river there now, and it looks completely different from the place that he encountered when he was hiking all those years ago.

And all of this was achieved by a guy leaving his home every day and just. Doing a very simple thing, not taking on a gigantic task, but just doing a simple thing. He takes a few acorns, he makes holes in the ground, and he plants the acorns, and he does that over and over again.

So when I have this feeling, I like to think about this guy. I like to think about this, you know, fictional French man who just. Focused on the things he was doing that day. He didn't think about growing this lush valley. He thought about planting a few acorns today.

That really helps me get through times like this because I shouldn't be thinking about that far off goal. What I should be thinking about is what is it today? Because kind of like the man who returns to the valley and finds that it's lush. I sit here and I look back and there are now literally thousands of pages of dialogue that I've written and.

If I had sat down to write episode one and thought to myself, I have thousands of pages to write, I would've found that just too much. I would've found that a pretty crushing burden. So instead it's just every day a pocket full of acorns, a few holes in the ground every single day, and then one day you look back and there's the valley.