Thoughts from the Thinking

There is, or was, an email/chain mail being passed around about an Apple Tree. To sum it up succinctly:

The “good” apples on the top of the tree are the women who are pure, clean, worthy of love and deserving of respect. The “good” apples on the top are the ones Men should be striving for, the ones Men deserve. However, to get the “good” apples, you have to climb the tree. The apples on the ground are the women of, shall we say, “loose standards.” More often than not, so the story goes, the boys of this world go for the easy apples rather than climbing the tree to reach out for the “good” apples. The “good” apples then suffer hanging up in that tree.

I don’t entirely agree with this analogy for a few reasons, not the least of which being that climbing that tree isn’t easy and, frankly, I am yet to see if it is even worth it. No matter how many times I have metaphorically climbed that tree for some prized apple, I have found myself falling flat on my face, bruised, cut, and crying. This is not because I can’t climb trees (though my mother always trimmed the limbs closest to the ground so we couldn’t climb trees in our backyard) but because the apples make themselves seem within reach only to sway out of reach. Maybe I am climbing too high; maybe I should get my vision checked; but maybe, just maybe, the apples at the top aren’t really there anymore.

Isn’t it possible that there aren’t any apples on the top of the tree? Could this be a Winter of Love? As many times as I have climbed the tree, I have fallen down with nothing. This leads me to believe that there is nothing there to have. I’ve seen good apples fall to the ground and be crushed by the pressures of this world. The standards that seem so high are so low that the apples on the top fall down to meet the demands of the world. There are no winners in this game anymore. Ours is a generation of death, a generation of falling down and not getting up.

One of the biggest problems of the world today is that everyone is trying to analogize love and their purity or worthiness of someone. The problem is not that there isn’t anyone worth our time, but that we are all broken so much that we aren’t looking in the right places. The analogy of the apple tree is a neat little thing, but just plain wrong. The good ones are not necessarily at the top of the tree, it seems more often than not they have fallen down and are broken on the ground. It is very unrewarding for the Men of the world who do climb the tree to reach for the true women when they find nothing and fall down. The pain of hitting the ground is immense and it takes a very long time to get back up.

The world is full of fallen angels and broken saints. . .and I am no excception. I’ve been broken, I’ve been hurt by women who didn’t even realize they were hurting me. I have lost friends and nearly lost friends because of the hurt involved in this emotional turmoil known as growing up.

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

- Westley (The Princess Bride)

Life can be painful, I know and sometimes I still deal with it. . .but, I have learned a lot from my experiences and I know there is so much more to life than falling off a tree reaching for something that isn’t there. . . .

Sometimes, I have to remember some great advice from a crazy Disney baboon who knows Kung Fu:

“Yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it; or learn from it”

- Rafiki (The Lion King)

Life can be painful (I got the scars to prove it) but sometimes, you have to fall down to get some sense knocked into you (and I got the bumbs to prove it).