What’s the Acorn of Your Life look like Right Now?
Comparing your life to an acorn is a simple way to explain where you’ve been in life, where you currently are, and what the rest of your life can potentially look like. While every acorn begins with massive potential, it takes a lot for it to become a mighty oak tree. Are there lessons hidden within an acorn’s journey to becoming a mature oak tree that we can utilize in our own lives? There sure are, and there’s great value utilizing those lessons as a measuring device for how a person’s doing in life.
Think about the fact that there isn’t a single thing in life that’s fair. Nothing. Well…there is one thing, and that’s that we’re all provided 24 hours in every day. No one gets more nor less. We all get 24. Plus, we have the majority of control over what we do with those 24 hours each day. But when we’re born, we need an incredible amount of support to survive until we at least reach our teens. And pretty much all of us receive some level of support thanks to our parents, medical miracles, and the greater community we live in and the support that each provides.
Like humans, oak trees are miracles that have overcome unique obstacles from their beginning. An acorn begins its life as the fruit of a flower that was pollinated by wind carrying pollen from other oaks in the area (community support). Once mature, the acorn drops from its parent tree usually in the fall. Since so many birds, animals, and insects utilize acorns as a major food source, for an acorn to have any chance of survival, it typically needs to be buried by a squirrel or blue jay that caches food for winter and forgets where it buried it.
If conditions are right the acorn will germinate sending down a root before any shoot appears above ground, anchoring themselves and building a reserve system before investing energy into visible growth. The seedling stage is fragile as the growing acorn faces threats from browsing animals, competition from other plants for light and nutrients, drought, fungal disease, and more. Just like the first five years of a human’s life where our brain is being wired in a way that significantly affects the rest of our life, successfully getting through this stage is essential in determining what we will become decades later.
Back to the acorn. After surviving the seedling phase, the young (now oak) enters a sapling stage where its trunk thickens and it starts to establish a more serious root system. It’s then that what was once an acorn, now a firm and steady tree, becomes ready to pursue its destiny. This is similar to the human experience of ages 6-18 embracing the educational opportunities provided by their community’s school system and partnering that with as much immersion as possible into the culture and society a person grows up in. This is such a critical phase in determining the future of a human as no two experiences are exactly the same. It’s similar for young oak trees that experience varying degrees of sunlight, water availability, soil fertility, and competition from neighboring trees; not to mention the threat of fire, storms, disease, and human activity like land clearing. Sound familiar?
There comes a time in an oak tree’s life, typically between 20-50 years, where it has established itself with a self-sustaining system of living that allows it to pursue one of its primary purposes which is producing new acorns. For us humans, this occurs when we ourselves become parents. Just like an oak tree, it’s what’s inside us; the ways we’ve learned, grown and developed over the course of our life, that has great influence over our children and what they will eventually become as adults. Each of us are special in our own unique way and parenting amplifies the lessons we’ve learned that end up getting passed on to our kids.
And then later, there’s wisdom. In Norse mythology, oaks were linked to the wisdom of Thor. In Greek mythology, oaks were sacred to Zeus, and the oracle at Dodona reportedly interpreted the rustling of oak leaves as divine messages, literally treating the tree as a source of wisdom. Oaks are long-lived once established, with some species living beyond a thousand years in exceptional cases.
Over the course of an acorn’s life, there’s a constant maturing process going on. It’s the same with us humans. Our maturing is based on the everyday events that occur in our life. What we do with that maturity becomes the legacy that we leave behind as we depart this earth and find our place in heaven. Reminds me of a quote that’s on a plaque in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” that reads: All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away. Giving away, or sharing, the lessons each of us has learned in life to others is the highest form of wisdom, and I believe love.
I began writing this wondering if you’d be willing to compare your life to an acorn is a simple way to explain where you’ve been in life, where you currently are, and what the rest of your life can potentially look like utilizing the lessons offered by the acorn to mighty oak treejourney.
To compare, you can begin by thinking about the chapters of your life that have already occurred. What was your birth to age 5 and age 6-18 chapters like and how did they influence the paths you travelled down during those years, and then the paths you chose once you entered adulthood? What relationships were formed and how have they influenced who you are today? Define the things that currently interest you the most, and how those previous years of life formation developed those interests. What role did coincidence or luck play in your past? The answers to these questions are what led you to where you are today, the precious present.
When you think about where you are today, you should be able to have a clear vision of the roots you’ve grown that bring stability to your life. Your current roots are the foundation of what you’ve built the life you’re now living upon. The key here is to identify which roots provide you with the most joy and contentment in life and ask yourself what kind of soil and fertilizer you fed those particular roots to produce the results that are most important in your life right now. It can also help to analyze which roots have NOT been supporting the areas of your life that are most important to you, realizing that there’s really no need to keep feeding those roots and that your life’s foundation will strengthen itself when you cut them out and remove them. They may have been holding you back all this time.
Now’s a good time to pause for a moment and compare your life to the life cycle of an acorn. Think back to how fortunate the acorns were that were buried and then forgotten by a squirrel or blue jay allowing them to put down some roots that supported survival. Assess the people that were an important part of your growth and the ones that helped you deepen your own personal roots. From a metaphorical standpoint, they may have been the quality soil, the water, or the nutrients that helped you withstand the storms, challenges, speed bumps, or blockades in your life. Embrace the joy that this thought process brings. If you want to amplify the joy, reach out to the people that have made a positive difference at some point in your life and simply thank them. That will produce what I like to refer to as “double joy.” Funny isn’t it, how one person’s life can, and does, touch so many others.
Once you’ve had a chance to utilize the acorn to mighty oak thought process to bring clarity to where you’ve been and where you are today, looking out into your future gets really exciting. You now have a lot more data, experience and wisdom in coming up with an executable strategy for developing the life you’ve always dreamed of. Think about the most successful oak trees. They have roots that stretch deep down in the most fertile soil and the ability to capture the water from rain and then distribute it efficiently to every part of itself. It knows that the sun is a gift that allows photosynthesis to take place producing life-giving chlorophyll that keeps it healthy.
While an oak tree offers benefits beyond its own simple existence, like providing shade, a place for birds and animals to build nests, food for many species with its acorn production, and lumber that’s been vital for humans for thousands of years, it still doesn’t possess a brain. But YOU do! And that brain of yours can use the lessons gained from a tiny acorn that measures less than an inch in diameter that becomes a massive tree measuring up to 150 feet tall with a trunk up to almost 5 feet in diameter.
Your life can look just like that whether you feel you’re currently in the acorn stage or midway to becoming the mighty oak that you’re destined to someday become. That wonderful brain of yours guarantees it. And, yes, you have choices available like where you want to plant yourself, and in what type of soil you want to set your roots in. You can plant yourself where the sun shines most the day and where the rain comes frequently. You can choose a location that adds protection from the inevitable storms that will come your way and have a recovery plan in place for the disruptions in your life’s flow. You can spread the roots of your life’s foundation deep and wide through the choices you make today, and each day moving forward.
I acknowledge that many of you prefer a simple step by step process, so here it is. If you truly want to bring immediate improvement to your life:
1. Assess your past from an action/consequence standpoint. Every action you took had a specific consequence. You need to know how those consequences, both good and bad, led to your life being at the point it’s at today.
2. Consider the alternative actions that were available and how the consequences tied to those actions may have been different. You can’t change the past but you sure can learn from it. View the learning opportunities as wisdom you can keep in your “toolkit for life” and pull out what you’ve learned whenever it can provide for a better future.
3. Embrace fully where you’re personally at in life right now. Regardless of where you’re at, there’s many in this world that dream of a life like yours. Don’t believe me? Go ask anyone battling stage 4 cancer right now.
4. Get excited about your future. When you understand your past and have a clear vision of what brought you to the present day, you’ve provided yourself with a huge dose of Hope. Hope is the foundation of inspiration and motivation. Waking up each day loaded with Hope ensures potential paths to success in all that you attempt.
5. Believe in yourself and share the joy you experience in the future with others. There’s a piece of art in our home that says, “This Joy I Feel is LIFE” and seeing it each day reminds me that our emotions are revealed to others by the way we live our life each day. Another plaque in our home says “Enjoy Life. Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be” and over time, I’ve found a lot of truth in that.
I love hope. I love everything that hope represents. That’s why I have hope for all of you. I hope you’ll give the acorn of your life thought process a valid try by taking some form of action on it today. Without action, nothing changes. With intentional action, positive change is immediate. The knowledge of where you’ve been and what got you to the point you’re at today is one of the most powerful life tools you have available….and it’s FREE. Take Action on it Today! Hey…I Believe In YOU! GiddyUp!