Mahatma Gandhi is credited for the saying,” Be the change that you wish to see in the world”, and I hope to follow Gandhi’s message. About two years ago at the end of the school year I asked my parents for a tree. Now why a tree? I’ve always seen trees as the yang of our eco system. Trees clean the air, use CO2 that humans exhale, and produce the necessary oxygen humans need to breath. I also see trees as a metaphor for human life and emotions. They are strong and resistant to that which threatens to harm them but when pushed to far they may snap at their weakest part. When combining the metaphor for life and the positive environmental impact that trees have, I couldn’t think of anything else I could want.
Now you may be asking what it matters that I wanted a tree and why it matters why I wanted a tree. See the thing is, I am one of those people who is not satisfied by just getting a tree( or anything that has a similar simplicity), that tree has to have some kind of meaning to it. It’s one of the peculiar things about being me. So I used my metaphor for a tree and the promises I had recently made to myself and came up with the meaning for the tree. As I grew, the tree grew. As it grew stronger and more resistant to potential harms, so would I and my promises. The tree would be my representation of me, my life and my promises for myself, my future and my community.
When I finally got to this point in my thought process where I normally would be done, I got to thinking. I had recently took on the thought process that I was only a small part in a vastly larger system of people and societies. My individual ideas and problems were “small bananas” compared to the ideas and problems of the community, the country and the world. So I decided to take my own individual tree and promises as open them as wide as I could and make a plan for more than just me. And so Plant a Promise was born.
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