One Apple A Day #905 - Pruning
If you walk or drive around the countryside, you can observe that the vineyards are all bare naked. It is the result of a typical winter activity called pruning.
Pruning is a practice that consists of the selective removal of certain parts of a plant. Typically, diseased, damaged, dead or non-productive parts.
I'm not an expert, so I have no ideas of the guidelines that farmers follow in this practice. But I've always found the whole process fascinating.
Once a year, to ensure that the plant can thrive and be fruitful, it must be stripped down of all the old and exhausted branches.
As counterintuitive as it may sound to me, it works.
By removing the old, the farmers make space for the new.
Those vineyards that look sad and naked now will be flourishing and prosperous in a few months.
Isn't it the same for us?
Looking back at my life, I can see how many times I couldn't move forward until I did some personal pruning, removing old branches there were not serving me anymore.
It may seem like a paradox, but sometimes in order to grow, we have to remove first.