Article: Time to prune

Once upon a damp Welsh road a mountain bike club was pedalling its muddy way home. Dreams of hot showers and hearty meals… Suddenly they happened upon that cyclist’s joy, the hedge mower or thorn scatterer. Yipee! Some inexperienced individuals pedalled on, others slowed their pedalling and began a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to steer their cycles between the generous sprinkling of hawthorn and blackthorn flailings. Soon all but one smug member of the club (who had, at the sight of the machine, shouldered his bike and begun walking) began to feel the delightful jarring of gravel on wheel rims. Together and with many cheerful remarks in the direction of the workman the club began mending punctures at the side of the road.

Growth¹ the process, gives rise to growth² the product. A hedge fills out. Our lives fill up with stuff. How do we manage growth²? Hedge owners tend to mow off growth² once a year. What do we do with our growth²?

Our growth² includes activities, commitments, habits, relationships, opportunities and possessions. All of this growth² requires our resources – time, money, thoughts, energy etc. just to sustain it. Our growth² in theory could increase exponentially but our resources, they don’t. We have to prune. What happens if we don’t?

I was in a wood once. The majority of a tree fell with an alarming impact just a few metres in front of me. I knew that this was part of a natural process; a consequence of there being limited resources available in a competitive environment; the way overgrown organisms and systems manage themselves. Some trees and branches prosper others give way and die. I knew that this was the way woodland reaches a mature equilibrium. It still caused me to whimper in a most unmanly fashion.

If we don’t prune - employ some sort of growth² management strategy - pruning will be imposed on us by the consequences of our passivity.

• Neglect permitted decay – relationships cool, skills become blunt, opportunities fade... And because we haven’t pruned we aren’t in control of which growth² prospers and which growth² senesces. Often our most precious growth² is choked out and it’s only later, with regretful hindsight, that we notice what we have lost and what has grown at its expense.
• Catastrophic major decline - some sort of unpleasant collapse. These are often termed breakdowns and get labelled as they present - physical, mental, emotional, moral, relational, financial… but rarely are they as neatly defined as their label hopes. Some breakdowns are unavoidable (accident, illness, disaster…), some are the cumulative effects of insufficient pruning.

There are at least 2 ways of managing growth²:

1. Passive, wholesale growth² subversion. This is treating all growth² as an inconvenience to be done away with. The simplest way of achieving this is becoming universally grumpy. If you do everything with an air of reluctance, treat every event as an irritation and every relationship as an inconvenience you can starve every aspect of your life of vitality, ensure that growth¹ is all but eliminated and allow atrophy to do its thing wholesale. This is my default attitude. It’s a poor strategy and regretfully I’m very good at it.
2. Deliberate, selective, investment focussed growth² removal – pruning. This all about having a careful think about what growth² you want to see grow some more and then ensuring it gets the majority of the resources you have by boldly removing growth² you’ve chosen to eliminate. This is the hard bit. Often the growth² we remove is good stuff. Often this pruning is accompanied by a chorus of objection; “You haven’t been to see us for a while…”, “But if you don’t be the club toilet paper secretary, who will?”, “Your performance review is in a few weeks…” and so on. Then there’s the internal objection. Any discontinuation of a habit, hobby or activity involves the loss of part of you and if that growth² is valued the pruning is painful, sometimes very.

So, pruning is the best way to manage growth² and maintain growth¹ but because it’s hard it may be worth getting some help. It seems that involving other, trusted folk in the process can be beneficial when it comes to discerning what our priorities should be. I’ve also found that a good rule of toe is to set apart time each year to consider which of my commitments, activities, possessions, expenses and habits should be discontinued / let go / sold / thrown out / cancelled in months to come. This ensures the stuff I do want to grow gets all the resources it needs to develop.

What are you doing about pruning?

The man who sows seeds in his ears

Will delight in the growth that appears

As it fruits and it dangles…

But before it strangles

He should courageously wield secateurs

                                                            A man