With an Eye for Tomorrow's Shade -- and A Few Good Nuts

Borrowing the essence of an Ancient Greek proverb, Canadian farmer Nelson Henderson mused, “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” 

Or, if I might bend the thought in a more personal direction, “whose nuts you do not expect to eat.”  I hope that notion, in our case, is not literally true.  We fully intend to have many vigorous and vibrant years ahead of us.  Having taken this principle of “sustainability” to heart, we exercise, we eat good food - more and more of it vegetables we grow ourselves, uncorrupted by chemicals on the plants or additives in the processing. But with my 60th birthday only weeks around the corner and Lori’s trailing a few years behind, it goes without saying that we aren't getting any younger. 

Nonetheless, yesterday we planted a dozen nut trees and bushes whose productive maturity won't arrive until we are moving closer to the tail end of ours.  Hazelnuts and chestnuts.  Six of each.  These have joined the pawpaw and pear trees we planted last year, and the apple, apricot, plum, and cherry trees a couple of years before that.  What could we possibly be thinking?

The short and somewhat defiant answer is that we are thinking that we fully intend to enjoy the quite literal fruits of these labors. Despite how our bodies are feeling this morning, the day after the clearing, the digging, the planting, the irrigating and the mulching, as the Monty Python character sang it on Broadway, “We are not dead yet.”

There is, however, a longer answer perhaps more defiant than the first.  The Greek version of that earlier quotation is, “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Just between you and me, society is not growing greater.  All kinds of people are wringing their hands about the state of our world, blaming this collective decline (as they perceive it) on everything from the “removal of prayer from schools” to the changing definitions of marriage to whichever political party is in power.  The real problem, of course, is none of those.  The problem is too little concern for tomorrow's shade.  In a time of slavish attention to quarterly reports, 24-hour news cycles, minute by minute responses to fluctuations in the markets, addiction to immediate gratification, and gratuitous indulgences of our own comfort and convenience, I am increasingly convinced that the greatest threat to civilization is the atrophication of our collective capacity for long-range thinking. 

If the Iroquois people advocated vetting every decision with an eye for how it would effect descendants seven generations beyond, we seem increasingly incapable of considering 15 minutes worth of implications.  We pollute, poison, extract, burn up and throw away as if "we" and "today" were all that matters, unwittingly and malignantly planting a presumptive flag in a tomorrow we will never see. 

Perhaps it's because Lori and I are gaining humility with age, or, with any luck, a little wiser; perhaps, as that quotation suggests, we simply find it meaningful; perhaps the land itself is teaching us a greater sense of stewarding responsibility, or perhaps it is the horizon-broadening anticipation of a grandchild on the way.  Whatever the reason, we are thinking more about the future, these days, than the past, and what it will be like to live there.

And planting trees.  Someone, after all, in that thusly improved society, will surely benefit from the shade once they've grown. 

And will hopefully enjoy the nuts.