Early morning is my favorite time of day. I love having coffee with my wife and watching the sunrise. We have a couple of chairs in our bedroom we use for our morning coffee and conversation. We open the blinds and look at the sunrise through the trees in our back yard.
A few weeks ago, Texas was hit hard with winter weather. We had ice, snow, and unusually cold temperatures. It killed some of our landscaping, and it has broken limbs off trees. In fact, one of my favorite trees, just outside of our bedroom window, was one that lost a major branch.
This morning as we were enjoying our morning routine, I noticed that the tree was recovering nicely. The branch that had broken was in the middle of the tree and the tree looked like a football goal post. This morning I saw a smaller branch was now growing where the branch was broken. Remarkably, it is four feet long already. Nature can be violent and destructive, but it can also be tender and healing.
Live oaks typically loose their leaves as the new leaves come on in the spring. We never really have leafless trees. Again, this year was an exception. The old leaves fell off after the freeze. I raked for six hours one day to clear the leaves. A week later I raked for two hours. Today I hired my landscaper to tackle the leaves. The result is my lawn is recovering, and the trees have amazing leaves on them now. It was like getting a haircut for the trees. A fresh start.
Taking this to a business parallel is easy after the past year. There were several businesses, including mine, that had to make dramatic adjustments after the “freeze” of Covid-19 and the lockdowns that resulted. For several months, things looked rather desperate and ugly. That drove me to restructure my business in looking at my costs and looking at what we do for our clients. We made the changes and trimmed back the things that were not working. We started to see the results by the end of summer and now what we have is a rebirth. It is a beautiful thing.
What did you do with your business because of last year’s recession? Are you taking the time to view it now with a different criterion? Can you see the results as a positive? Take the time to see the good in what you have done to survive and enjoy thriving again.
Looking at the past two decades you can see a pattern in economic disruptions about every five years. We know there will be more. Have you learned how to grow despite the disruptions? Maybe it’s more about have we learned not to panic as we deal with them.
Tomorrow we will enjoy our coffee and the sunrise again. I will look at it with a fresh set of eyes, realizing that we have not only survived, but are now thriving again.
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