What I Learned about my Limits. From a Plum Tree…
In our garden there is a Victoria plum tree. I planted it just four years ago, yet it has already grown to be over 2m tall. It produces some of the most succulent, dark purple plums I’ve taste and has become a key feature of the garden. This year, however, it exposed a weakness in my gardening skills. Back in early spring I was overjoyed to see the young tree literally covered in white blossoms. They seemed to be protruding from all sides and branches of the tree. Once the pollinators had got to work, I was similarly thrilled to see that soon the tree was filled from top to bottom with small green ovals, indicating the substantial harvest that was to come. Whereas last year we’d collected around 20 plums, I estimated we would be getting at least 10 times that number this year.
Then a few weeks ago, disaster struck. The plums developed fine until the branches were bulging with unripe fruit. And that exposed my error — the thin branches of the tree simply weren’t strong enough to hold up the weight of fruit that that was trying to grow. I should have thinned out around half of the fruit while they were smaller, then installed sufficient props to hold up the branches. Because I didn’t, I got up one day to find that one of the major branches had snapped under the weight of the fruit, leaving a mass of unripe plums that were no longer connected to the living tree, and causing damage to the tree. Despite what had been anticipated, not just the harvest but the very health of the tree had been affected.
This got me thinking — it strikes me that the plum tree has differing layers of functional capacity. At some levels, the tree has the capacity to produce a very large harvest. Its branches can produce sufficient blossoms and the nutrients drawn in by the roots can ripen them. But at other levels, the tree can’t cope with such a large harvest. There’s something of a disconnect between the differing layers of potential productivity, and it takes wise and deliberate decisions (i.e. thinning out the fruit and installing props) to care for its health for the long-term.
I think that’s true of you too — you have differing layers of functional capacity. Your resources in one area of life may not correspond to those in another area of life, and before committing to something you need to evaluate the whole rather than just the parts. You may feel capable of supporting a particular task at hand, but other factors present may render you actually unable to do so. I know this from my own experience. Two years ago I had to change careers somewhat abruptly. I loved the career I was in, and thoroughly believed myself capable of its unique stresses and pressures. However, it was a role that put a lot of pressure on my family. And as I sought to juggle the competing demands it became clear that to continue would risk the kind of structural damage experienced by my poor plum tree.
How about you? What specific challenges and stresses shape your overall capacity? Are you in a sustainable situation? Are your branches strong enough to support the fruit you’re trying to produce? Or do you need to thin it out a bit? Better to make that tough choice now, than to risk snapping a branch.
