#1183 Ripening and Rotting
If you're not green and growing, you're ripe and rotting."
Tiny Zehnder, founder of the Bavarian Inn, Frankenmuth, Michigan
Well said, Tiny. (Of course, being in food service, he would choose the "green and growing and ripe and rotting" alliterations.)
There is no standing still. This isn't to say we don't get to relax, nor is it to say that retirement is akin to rotting. What might be missed in Tiny's quote is that the ripening stage goes on for a long time. The fruit I buy today can be consumed for days to come.
Growing means different things at different times. In my early career, growing meant aggressively seeking knowledge, experiences, and opportunities. Like the young tomato plants in my garden, I was blossoming and producing nascent fruit. Later, the ripening stage took me through most of my career and continues today.
One change I'd like to offer when applying Tiny's quote to humans is that ripening can continue long into old age.
Rotting begins when we stop ripening, and ripening in humans, unlike in fruits and veggies, is a choice.
Barring serious illness, I expect to continue ripening with no end in sight. My dad turned 90 last November. Yesterday, he played nine holes at his home course and talked to me about improving his putting to take a stroke or two off his game. He continues to ripen.
Ripening is a continuum; rotting is an ending.
Soon, my tomato plants will offer me red, ripening fruit. If I leave it on the vine out in the elements, it will ripen and rot quickly. If I put it on the kitchen counter, I may get an additional day or two, but if it just sits, it will rot.
I can extend its life by picking it and using it in a salad or slow-cooking it to make a sauce.
The tomato represents us in our sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth decades. Some never get off the vine, and some come in and sit—both begin rotting rather quickly.
Others change and become other versions of themselves. Those don't rot.
If you will, the "salads and sauces" can be playing cards, pickleball, walking, or reading. They can also be attending a church picnic, a kids' soccer game, seeing plays, or concerts in the park. Golfing, woodworking, traveling, yoga, birding, or volunteering are all "salads and sauces." Anything that keeps us from sitting alone on the shelf staves off the rotting.
Rotting and dying will come to us all. Still waters turn stagnant and cease to support life. Mental and physical movement supports ours. The earlier the rotting begins, the sooner the end comes, and like that tomato, the best thing we can do is to get off the shelf.
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