There’s a lot to learn from a tree. Just looking at one can teach you plenty. How useful a tree is! From when it is young, it keeps helping people, with fruit, with flowers or with wood. All it asks for is a little care. But while we show up at the tree when there’s fruit, when there are flowers, when we need something, the rest of the time we don’t even look at it. Without care, little by little, the tree gives one last huge crop of fruit and quietly says goodbye. A lot of wood comes from that tree.
Some time later a new sapling is planted in its place. Maybe because we miss the old one, or maybe because we’re thinking of what the new one will give, the new sapling gets good care for a while. Then, when it grows up and starts giving fruit and flowers, history repeats itself. Maybe it too will end with a quiet goodbye. Still, it never sulks and stops giving. Right up to the moment it leaves, it gives everything it has.
That’s its fate, and that’s the lesson we can learn from trees.
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