Old Men Planting Trees

One suicide. Cancer. A heart attack while throwing football in the front yard with the kids. Kidney failure. Old age. Covid. An automobile accident.

I have lost clients in a variety of ways, more in the past five years than the previous thirty-five combined. There is a reason for this. Like me, my clients are getting older. With age comes increased chances for all sorts of surprise endings. On very rare occasions I allow myself to reflect on my mortality. When I do I quickly realize why I do it so rarely. It is not a pleasant experience.

It is said that no one knows the time or place, the day or hour of their own death. It’s a good thing. When life is lived with the assumption that it will continue indefinitely, it encourages us to make decisions we plan on having to live with. Maybe if we knew when we would die it would release all the selfish demons of hell into the world. 

When I was younger I never thought about what the world would look like after I was removed from it. That’s because when you are young such thoughts are incomprehensible. Once you reach a certain age, that all changes. You begin to think about it a lot. There’s even a buzzword for it…legacy.

I’ve always loved that old proverb: Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never rest. Let the old men plant trees, though they will never expect to eat the fruit of them. I can think of no better way to live life after 60 than this. Finding a way to leave your part of the world better than you found it seems like the most golden of rules. Its why parents want something better for their children than what they themselves had. Sometimes I hear people say that they want their kids to go through the same battles that they endured. “Why should I shelter them from hard times” the reasoning goes, “If I do they won’t become tough enough.” My reaction to this sort of thinking has always been, “What…are you nuts??!!” Why would I want my kids to have it as hard as I did? First of all, my kids will be dealing with problems that I never dreamt of when I was their age. So why not make it easier for them where I can so they can be freed up to tackle these new problems?

Leaving things better. That’s the goal. Its not always achievable. Some things can’t be fixed. Some struggles are eternal. But when we can, when we are able, we need to plant some trees that someone else will picnic under.