The Tree, The Fruit, and The Ladder

Here's a thought that came to me a few days ago and I've pondered it since then.

Imagine for a moment that we can represent true spirituality and even the purpose of our existence in this world as a tall tree. High up in the tree is the fruit that we're here to pick and enjoy. It's life changing. It's meant for us and is the true nourishment we need. But it's beyond our normal reach. So we find or build long, tall ladders we can climb to get to the fruit.

Imagine a positive religion as a ladder, or a life philosophy as one. Any enterprise, any structured activity or array of human activities could be conceptualized as a ladder propped up against that high tree. Some of the ladders may be rickety and dangerous or too short, but some are great and even truly inspired. Perhaps, many are. And you may properly believe that you're on the best one of all, a great ladder that's been explicitly designed for reaching the highest fruit of all. You've been taught how to climb the ladder. And suppose you've learned well. So you climb high. And you've not just mastered the techniques of ascent, you've learned lots of other things along the way because of what you've experienced and seen as you've climbed.

But here's the problem. Many people who climb in search of the ultimate fruit tend to cling tightly to their ladder with both hands. And they won't let go. Ladder climbing has been turned from a means into an end. And that's a problem. When people keep a firm grip on their ladder, some fearfully and with white knuckles, they can't actually reach out for the fruit that awaits them and take it and eat it, and share it with others.

Only those who are willing to let go of the ladder can reach for the fruit. They can still keep their feet firmly planted on its rungs, but they have to reach out beyond its structure with an open hand to get the real treasure they've sought.

And the tragedy, it seems to me, is that many people who have good ladders just become ladder experts, ladder specialists and aficionados. They work on their ladders a lot, and paint them, and polish them, and keep them in good repair. They may even gild them with gold and show them proudly to others. But when they climb, they simply cling and don't reach out for what's really the purpose of the climb.

The moral of this little metaphor is, of course, simple. Find a great ladder and climb high. But then learn to let go enough to reach for the fruit that's the real point of the climb. Life, after all, isn't about the ladder, but ultimately the fruit.

Priorities

We all have priorities. We value some things over others. We prefer certain activities to alternatives. And yet, we're not always aware of our priorities. Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich suggested that everyone has what he called an "Ultimate Concern" - a priority that trumps all others, a most important thing in your life. For some people, it might be life itself. For others, love, or family. For too many, it seems to be money, or power, or status.

The ancient stoic philosophers believed that our chief concern should be to know what is properly our ultimate good. Then we can take care to govern our lives accordingly, not letting our priorities get out of order, but giving the most time and attention to what's most important, and the least to the least. The fake urgencies of life often cause us to get this backwards, giving our focus to ephemeral things that are actually of little value, and letting them crowd out the things that are of greatest meaning and significance.

You've heard the old story, of the rocks and the jar, I'd imagine. A professor has a very large glass jar on a table in front of the class. He tells his students that he's going to fill it with rocks, and he does. "Is it full?" he asks. They all agree. It's full to the top. Then he produces a bucket of pebbles and begins to pour them in around the rocks, filling it even more. "You see, it wasn't actually full before," he explains as they all contemplate the much more packed container. Then he produces a bucket of sand and starts to pour it also into the jar, filling in all the cracks and spaces between the rocks and pebbles.

The professor explains that the jar is like a life. If he had started out filling it up with the little things, the grains of sand, and had packed it to the top that way, there would have been no room for the bigger pebbles, or the much larger rocks. But by filling it with the biggest things first, there was also ample room for the smaller things. He then explained the metaphor explicitly. If we allow the little urgencies and demands of life to fill our time and hearts, we'll have no space left over for the bigger things. But if we start of with a focus on what matters most, we'll also have plenty of room for life's smaller matters. It's all about priorities.

And then, there is, of course, the variant of the story where an enterprising student suddenly stands up, walks up to the desk, pops the top of a beer can he's carrying, and slowly pours it into the apparently full jar, explaining as he does, one more insight: "There's always room for Bud."

How are you with priorities? They matter in a business just like they do in a life. Get them wrong, and all sorts of things go wrong as well. Get them right, and many other things go right, things worth celebrating. Then, there's room for a Bud.

What Makes Your Life Feel Rich?

On Thursday, November 20, 2014, a great teacher left this life. David Menasche had taught eleventh graders at Coral Reef High School in Miami for 16 years. In 2006, at the age of 34, he was diagnosed with a fatal form of brain cancer and told he had months to live. But he fought on for 8 more years. 

Right after the diagnosis, he returned to the classroom, which he called his “sanctuary,” and told his students that he wanted to spend the time he had left with them. Early this year, he explained his choice to continue to teach by saying:

For me, teaching wasn't about making a living. It was my life.

Nothing made me happier or more content than standing in front of a classroom and sharing the works of writers such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jack Kerouac, Tupac Shakur and Gwendolyn Brooks and watching my students "catch" my passion for language and literature.

I loved watching these 15- and 16-year-olds grapple with their first major life decisions -- future careers, relationships, where to live, which colleges to attend, what to study-- at the same moment they're learning to drive and getting their first jobs and experimenting with identity and independence.

No matter how sick he felt, he was in the classroom. He was in these kids’ lives. But in 2012, he had a major stroke, or catastrophic seizure that left him partly crippled and mostly blind. He had to retire from the work he loved. But he didn’t have to abandon his students. In fact, he hatched a plan to visit former students around the country, to see what, if any, impact his work had effected in their lives. He announced his plan on Facebook and immediately had 50 invitations within 48 hours. He ended up traveling more than 8,000 miles to visit hundreds of his former students. And they shared with him their memories from class. His teaching had mattered. It had touched their lives. But most of all, they remembered the personal conversations they had shared with him while in school. He wrote,

As I had hoped, they recalled favorite lessons and books from class, but, to my great surprise, it was our personal time together that seemed to have meant the most to them. Those brief, intimate interludes between lessons when we shared heartaches and vulnerabilities and victories were the times my students remembered. And it was through them I realized that those very human moments, when we connected on a deep and personal level, were what made my life feel so rich, then and now. My students had taught me the greatest lesson of all. They taught me that what matters is not so much about what we learn in class, but what we feel in our hearts.

David wrote a book full of the lessons he learned and taught along the way. It’s called The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons. It will be soon made into a movie, and Steve Carell will play the teacher who cared so much.

In this Thanksgiving Season, I urge you to think about what makes your life feel rich, and to cultivate more of those moments. Teacher David Menasche learned that it’s all about the very human moments we share and that can resonate for years. His realizations are confirmed and deeply reflected in another book just published by one of my good friends, Matt Hamm. Matt’s book is entitled Redefine Rich, and is available early in a special first release edition through his website, www.MattHam.com. Go check it out. Read. Reflect. And perhaps, this holiday season can be one in which you deepen your life with the things that matter the most, the priorities that will make you feel richer than ever.