Growth rings. If you read my Words of Wisdom Wednesday posts last week, you read a quote by George Pocock about the growth rings of trees. (If you have never read the book The Boys on the Boat by Daniel James Brown, it is an excellent work and well worth your time.) One of the things that George Pocock saw in the tree rings is the same stuff he saw in the boys of the crew team. When you look at the rings of a tree you can tell certain things about it. For starters each rings represents a year, so you can determine the age quite easily. The size of the rings determines the health of the tree in a given year. Narrow rings indicate drought, while thick rings indicate abundant moisture in a given year. Likewise fire damage can also be determined by scare tissue on the outside of a ring. What George Pocock gained from this knowledge was that people are like trees. You can tell a lot about people by studying their “rings”. He could study at the boys trying out for crew and determine where they would fit best in the team. Their years of life experience, the environment in which they grew up, the families they came from, the interests they had, etc. For the boys who were the focus of this story, they got the right grouping together!
Like these boys, we all have rings on our life story. What do your rings tell about you? You have experiences, dreams, goals, desires that belong to no-one else. Where are your rings going to take you? What do you want to accomplish in this life? When others look at the cross section of your “tree trunk” years from now, what will they see?