2023 July 25 The wisdom of an apple

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about a little life lesson that came up from something simple, pruning an apple tree. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like and tell your friends and send me a message. If you don't, send me a message anyway, tell me what you'd like to hear. 

Saturday I ended up in a situation where I was pruning an apple tree. Of course, summer's not exactly the ideal time to prune a fruit tree. Spring is even worse. You'd prefer to do it before spring started, or at the onset of autumn. But nonetheless, it was requested of me, and because it was a nice day, I thought, Well, it's probably not bad. 

Michael Phillips has a wonderful book on growing organic apples, running an organic apple orchard, and he said that the best way to have a fruit treat pruned is to stand underneath it from everywhere. You should be able to see the sky, because you want a lot of air to get through the tree.

This poor tree was just tremendously overgrown and neglected for years. I noticed it was loaded with tart green apples. A lot of them had imperfections, but a lot of them were full-size apples and looked really great. I started pruning it. I actually ended up putting about three and a half hours into it, and every time an apple would drop, I'd look at it. I thought, This isn't a great apple, and I set them aside and put them in a bag. But, you know, it's not a bad looking apple. Cut the bad spots out and eat it. I must've eaten a dozen and a half apples through the course of the afternoon. It was actually great. 

All these fresh apples I was setting aside were pretty good. It was a full-sized shopping bag full of nice sized, nice looking green apples from the branches I had pruned, and other ones that I saw drop. They weren't perfect, but they're perfectly good and they're unsprayed. They were  lovely apples. Ultimately, I ended up leaving them at church. I talked to one of the priests and he said I could leave them.

Do you want to leave them for the Spanish community? Do you want me to put them at the front of the church now? There was an English mass starting at the same time. For those of you who don't follow me regularly, I sing in the Spanish choir, so I go to the Spanish services. He said, Why don't you leave them for the Spanish community?

In my heart, I agreed because I knew they would really appreciate getting fresh, totally organic, (not certified organic,) but truly, completely unadulterated food. I checked after mass the next day, and the entire bag was taken. I was really excited because I was thinking, What recipes do I have to work with on green apples.

I don't know who took them, but I'm sure they're planning to make something yummy using grandma's recipe or something. What struck me was, it wasn't like somebody took a couple. They didn't look at them and say, Oh, they're not perfect.

They were just thrilled to get a whole bag of apples that were in good shape. I mentioned they're right from across the street. There's a convent there. I said Apple's from in front of the convent. They knew where the tree was. They knew the whole history. How good does it get? 

So what are the takeaways from this little story? Well, the first takeaway obviously is I'm a longtime eater of dropped fruit. I do it all the time. I have pear trees in the yard. We just pop them off the tree and eat them. They have to sit and age for a while, and I find that when I do the grass cutting in the fall, just before the frost starts to come, they've been sitting either on the tree or on the ground, just long enough that they are delicious. I'll eat all the good parts out of the apple, heave it over the fence, and the deer finish it off for me. Love it. Natural eating at its very best.

But I also knew that most of the Anglican community wouldn't be interested in these because they weren't perfect. They might have had a little spot on them. Any with wormholes I set aside. Nothing like that. The apples were all in good shape, but they weren't perfect.

However,  for my friends in the Spanish community, the apples were super special. They're fresh, chemical free, and they were just plain free. It was win, win, win, win. One thing after another. Even though they weren't fully ripe, they were totally edible. They were a little tart, but if you liked tart apples, they're fantastic.

I'm sure they had recipes from somewhere, so they knew what to do with the apples that they just had a great time with them. It made me really happy that here are all these apples that probably typically would've just been discarded or let to fall on the ground, and they were actually used. As so often happens, most people that had the opportunity were missing out on a great chance in search of the perfect opportunity.

They'd rather buy nice looking apples that are literally covered in poison at the store than enjoy truly delicious fruit right off the tree. There's this double-edged negative going on for these people that wouldn't be interested in the apples. They're missing the amazing right in front of them, and they're chasing the inferior. They're following it for the wrong reasons. They're following it for appearance instead of real value. So you probably see where this is going now. 

It's pretty easy to see in terms of farm fresh fruit. Think about how many other ways which we mislead ourselves due to poor external influences. Are we more worried about Facebook friends who really don't care about us, yet we ignore our own friends and family? Or are we busy making sure our car is pristinely clean instead of making the time to play some games with our kids or grandkids?

What about knowing every sports score and statistic, but not really being sure how Congress and the three branches of government are supposed to work, and maybe not even knowing who our own government representatives are? 

It isn't because we're all stupid, far from it. It's usually because there are many forces at work that want to take our focus off of the important things, to emphasize things that keep us distracted. Or perhaps it just makes us in a profitable for a business, much like scurrying past that gorgeous apple tree to rush to the store to get poisonous apples. 

Now, and every day, is a good time to reevaluate what's important in our lives and revisit our own life vision. Every single action in our lives moves us closer to our vision and all the intermediate SMART goals. We remember what SMART goals are. Is everything moving us towards where we want to go, or do we treat that vision like a dream, something you think of but that'll never happen?

Instead, focus on what society tells us is important. We have a really clean car. We get a new car every year. We get a new phone every year, Society's only too happy to tell us how to spend our money. That keeps us involved in having to run the same game over and over again. Every day is a precious gift and we should really make the best of every single one of them.

That starts with seeing all the gold all around us and learning to ignore all the fool's gold that society and businesses use to distract us. Working all afternoon, eating fresh apples that were minutes off the tree, improving that tree's health - that really made me refocus on what a better priority that was than almost anything else I could have been doing that day.

I got a huge life lesson and a podcast topic out of it. It was an awesome day for doing something simple, and not going to the huge grocery store, going to the mall, spending money trying to find happiness when I had happiness right there in front of me. The point is, if we open ourselves up to life, life has a way of giving us a lot of gifts in return. 

Your homework (always optional) is to think of some opportunities you've let pass you by because someone else said it wasn't worthwhile. Maybe you've never been very good at music.  I wouldn't try playing the piano, or I don't even get that ukulele. You know you aren't very good at math, so why would you try and learn how to do a checkbook? Or why would you get an accounting program? You weren't very fast in high school, so why would you try running now?

A friend of mine is a few years older than me. Now, in his early seventies, he's still running half and full marathons. He looks awesome. He was never a real athletic guy. If he wanted to listen to certain people, they'd say, Don't start running now. I mean, you're too old to run. It's probably not good for your health, and you really weren't very good anyway. But he didn't do that. Instead, he followed his own vision, and he's having a blast. Now if his dog wants to go for his run, his dog gets a treat, because the dog might be going miles at a time. 

So revisit your own life. Trying to imagine all the things you would've done if that negative influence wasn't there. Make a new kind of dessert. Learn a musical instrument. Study for a new job in a completely different field. It's never too late to start living your own dream. 

That's it for the evening. Thanks so very much for, for joining me tonight.

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