Lessons About Life from the Apple

We transform ourselves and our lives when we look at things differently. Take a new look at THE APPLE and what it can teach us. "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World," (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375760393/susandunnmome-20 ) is a delightful book full of fascinating facts as well as profound truths.

1. Apples don’t grow true to seed. It's grafting makes the Braeburn or the Gala.

2. The experimental Geneva Orchard contains incredible varieties.

Apples that taste like bananas and pears; spicy apples and sweet ones; yellow, green, spotted, russet, striped, and purple.

3. Apples can be small as a grape or weigh more than a pound.

4. Johhny Appleseed was planting apple orchards for the cider, the alcohol.

5. Not until prohibition, did the apple industry come up with the slogan, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," to promote them for their health qualities.

6. The tremendous original variety has been all but killed off by the dominance of a few commercially important apples
Apple breeders, “locked in a kind of sweetness arms race with junk food,” lean heavily on the genes of the Red and Golden Delicious.

7. Apples originated around Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan. "Alma-Ata" means "father of the apple."

8. Evidently there are almost as many ways to be an apple, as there are to be a human being!

"I saw apples," writes Pollan, "with the hue and heft of olives and cherries alongside glowing yellow Ping- Ping balls and dusky purpose berries. I saw a whole assortment of baseballs, oblate and conic and perfected round, some of them as bright as infield grass, others dull as wood. And their taste -- imagine sinking your teeth into a tar potato or a slightly mushy Brazil nut covered in leather. On first bite some of these apples would start out with high promise on the tongue… only to suddenly veer into a bitterness so profound it makes my stomach rise in recollection."

9. The apple tree is no longer evolving, but the viruses, bacteria, fungi and insects who love it are.

Pollan continues: "In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The apple tree is no longer evolving, but the viruses, bacteria, fungi and insects who love it, are. The domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species' fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all!) has been dangerously compromised.

Now here’s the EQ question -- Are you changing enough to keep up with the -- figuratively and literally speaking -- viruses, bacteria, fungi and insects that live in your world? Or have you “domesticated yourself” to the point where you are no long fit?

Keep evolving. Become a master of change, i.e., resilient. It’s an Emotional Intelligence competency.