Get Your Trees Planted

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second best time is today.”  – Chinese proverb.

This focus this week is ringing in a new year, as well as a new decade.  The beginning of a new decade helps us to put a lot of this “new year, new you” talk into perspective. 

New year resolutions are frighteningly common, and commonly ignored just days into the “fresh start”.  Days become a month, months become a year, and we’re right back where we started from – too often doing the same things, over and over.

When the years become a decade, the changes that occurred while doing those seemingly same things come into better focus.  Ten years ago we were just beginning to dig out from the housing and financial crisis.  Twenty years ago we were focused on something called “Y2K”.  Thirty years ago we sent troops to Kuwait for a conflict not yet totally resolved.  Forty Years ago the Reagan Revolution was being launched.  Fifty years ago we had just put men on the moon.

For me personally, the decades have had their share of ups and downs.  I can’t recall the six months I spent in the sixties.  The seventies got me almost through elementary school.  The eighties began in 6^th grade and ended with a college degree, as I spent the last week of 1989 trying to get a sign off on my final college paper.  The nineties were mostly spent as a banker, getting a master’s degree, and not proposing. Twice.

The millennium began with me as a highly leveraged homebuilder, and in the first decade I made a couple of million dollars before losing about four of it.  This decade began with me linking my online blogging identity to my actual name, and is ending with a syndicated column, the ability to work on issues that affect our state, and a relative level of financial security that seemed impossible ten years ago.

While we focus on the beginning of the new year as a date to “do better”, the truth is the date is an arbitrary point on the calendar.  It’s rare that the day becomes one of consequence in our personal lives or clearly defines the move from one era to another. 

While it’s easy to view broad trends of current events or our personal lives in decades, the events and progress are measured in days and even hours.  There are days where the struggle is just getting to the end of it.  At the end of the last decade and for the first few years of this one that was a daily struggle for me.  Some of you may feel that way now.

The first rule is to survive the day.  When you find that too many days in a row are like that, something has to change. 

I wasted too much time feeling sorry for myself and just getting through the days to make a lot of the changes that I knew needed to be made.  I don’t get those days back.  In hindsight, there were a few years there that were largely but unnecessarily a “character building experience”.

Figuring out what’s next is never easy.  In my case, there was a lot of trial and error.  Trying, even if not immediately successful, is always better than wallowing or acquiescing into a mere existence that is a daily grind. 

There will be new failures on the way to your future success. That’s OK.

We don’t get do-overs in life.  But last year, and the last decade, are now a things of the past. 

If you’re not currently sitting under the tree that you had hoped you would be by now, find the strength and courage you need to plant the next one. Then water it every day.  Happy new year to you and yours.