Out on a Branch

You have heard of Shirley McLane’s book “Out on a Limb” and its story of Shirley’s adventure into the paranormal. I decided that a good title for this newsletter would be “Out on a Branch” because Out on a Limb was already taken.

It is interesting to think that each of us sometimes find ourselves in a place that, if we are not careful, we could fall hard – out on the end of a branch that bends with every breath of wind. Insecure in the belief that we don’t have a good hold of the branch, but only have a precarious hold on our branch of the tree of life. No one wants to fall off.

“Falling” is an expression that many people use to describe how they went from living a “normal life” to being in a life of desperation. Feeling desperate over whether we will be working at the same job for another week due to the rumors that the company may be sold, or our job maybe cut due to the company being reorganized.

Maybe, it has nothing to do with our jobs, but what about our children? The son or daughter, who has all that a child could possibly want or need at home, but they believe that they are being prevented from doing all that is in their minds to do in their life with out their parents stopping them.

These kids often leave home believing that they are not loved or wanted believing that they can do better on their own. They leave home only to find themselves living on the street in the part of town where prostitution and drugs runs ramped, where love is a roll in the sack for a one minute’s feeling of being loved and wanted. They get into trouble with the police, get beaten up by other street kids and end up in a hospital with broken bones and scars that will be with them for the rest of their lives – physical and emotional.

Parents, inevitability worry about their children, day and night. Parents want only the best for their children, and in general give them more than they could ever hope for. But, kids today take advantage of this in their demands. Even parents on limited income find ways to purchase the things that their children want, not what they need, but what they want. It is a well known fact that people in general want to have all that they can get and more “come hell or high water.” They are never satisfied. That is why so many people steal from their employers and sell what they have stolen, sell drugs, buy “lotto” tickets, or go to the gambling halls in the hope of hitting it big. Many years ago it was said, “even if every man, woman and child on earth were given a million dollars, in a short time it would that the rich who would have all of the money again and the poor would be poor again.”

So what happened with the kids? Why are kids today thinking that their life is so bad that they think that the only solution is to leave home? Let me say, that I think that most of us as adults have had the same kind of thoughts that our kids have had, but we didn’t act on them. We are all looking for something better; something that will gives us a sense of direction and security. Kids today are told from the time they enter school until they graduate from university that life is tough. That they have to prove themselves constantly and that if they don’t, they can end up with nothing. Nothing, meaning that they have no job after 12 or 20 years of school, no employer will hire them and their parents have banded them from their homes and that life has taken away their ingenuity and ability to be. This sounds very negative to me and I believe it sounds that way to you also. Is their no solution(s) to the “problems” of life?

Does the answer lie in a strong belief in God? Would it help for a person, us, to be involved in a religion sect, ism or denomination? Would this help us to have a strong belief in God? We learn as we go through life that God is a God of love and that we don’t have to be a member of any religion to know this. We believe that we are on a spiritual path and that path leads us back to the presences of God. Or by contrast, through circumstances, we believe that there’s no God and that we are on our own and that when we die, that’s it. Nothing exists beyond this life.

In thinking about what it means to be out on a branch, I have learned that even the flimsiest twig on the very end of a branch can hold a great deal of weight and not break – in fact it is extremely flexible. Have you ever seen a bird too large for the branch it’s sitting on? Does the bird worry about the rest of the branch or the tree that is holding it? They are secure and never fall to the ground below. We as humans, however, we are not as trusting and secure as that bird. We are always checking the branch that we are on. We want the security of a large and sturdy branch close to the trunk where it would be almost impossible for the branch to break. We want all the security the branch (life) and the tree can give us. Thus we don’t have to worry about anything – or do we?

Security may be the answer to what we are looking for out on our branches of life. Security that we are being taken care of by our parents, our government, our spouse, our grown children, the guy next door, the person across the street, even God. How about the person who lives down the street? Or the man who offers us a job mowing his lawn, even though we are only a skinny 10 years old kid.

We are people in a world that is in a constant state of flux that changes from moment to moment. Sitting on the end of our branch, we believe that we will live to be a hundred and be healthy with the mind of a 20 year old.

Our future, on the end of the branch, just keeps growing and moving us forward. Forward to our greatest joys in life of love, money, a home, good job, a song in our hearts, and happy in the knowledge that our kids do have all that they could ever want and need without us worrying about them. Out on a branch, but secure in the knowledge that we are who we are, and maybe, that will be enough.