Every day I walk past the same tree, an apple. I shoot the tree a glance now and again, but remain generally uninterested in the fruit it bears. One day, however, there is one beautiful little apple at the top of the tree that catches my eye. My mind is made up at this point that I must scale the branches and pick this apple from the gentle stem that anchors it so weakly to that tree. As I climb I can feel my excitement building, until I reach it. When I finally reach the top of that tree I can feel that the apple isn’t ready to be picked yet, not yet ripe. As I turn to climb down the tree I fall, clipping what seems like a hundred branches on the way down. When I finally hit the ground all I can think is that picking that perfect little apple is not worth such pain. But i stand, wipe myself off, and make a resolution that I will pick that apple when it is good and ready.
So, I continue to take the same route every day, looking at all the apples now, hoping - even praying - that I can find one as spectacular on a lower, easier branch. My search is futile, all I can see is that perfect little apple perched on high on its bough. It seems now that the apple is ripe, ready to be picked, but I wonder if I am ready to climb that tree again. The thought of crashing through the tree branches is all-consuming now, and I don’t know if I can handle it again, but the thought of of someone else climbing that tree and picking my apple is almost as difficult. I need help making this decision.
“When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
John Green, Looking for Alaska
A civil society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
“
This latent mine - these unlaunch’d voices - passionate powers,
Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout,
Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,
These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death,
Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun and sleep,
Within the pallid slivers slumbering.
-A Font of Type, Walt Whitman
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