dead branches

I am sitting looking at a pine tree and this is a perfectly healthy tree. Towards its top the branches are covered in needles, and I see fresh clumps of new growth, new needles. But the bottom two thirds of the trunk is almost bare. There are only stubs of branches left. The branches themselves have died and dropped off. And just beneath the living branches, there are four or five dead branches, waiting to drop. And this is how this pine tree has grown: as it has grown taller, it has let go of its lower branches.

And seeing this, it makes me think that we humans could learn a thing or two from this tree. When we are young, when we are tiny infants, we learn ways of behaving, and we embed deep in our memory banks certain beliefs about the world, certain expectations. And these are all pertinent to our life as a baby, as a toddler, as a young child. But we tend to carry these beliefs and behaviours through life, long after the point where they are really serving us. And even when we are older we keep accumulating more and more baggage. We are so reluctant to really let go of things, to let things drop away, and this baggage weighs us down. It makes life heavy. It makes us incapable of being spontaneous, of really responding to the moment in a fresh way. We are always responding from the past, sometimes from a time long, long ago when we were that toddler.

So seeing this tree I am reminded of the importance of letting go of things that are no longer necessary, no longer helpful: behaviours, memories, belief systems – there's a whole complex psychology that we have stored away and are reluctant to drop. But if we can learn from this tree, if we can let go of all that old stuff, we will feel so much lighter, and our energy will be going into the new growth, the new growth within us: the branches of our life that are still alive and fresh. There's no point in carrying all that old baggage around with us. So let's learn from this pine tree and let go of our dead branches.