When conditions are good - sunshine, rain, wind, and other factors in ideal proportion, - trees grow at their best rate. When seasons of drought, or other hardships come, they slow down and use their energy toward survival rather than growth. We can see this in the patterns of their rings.
It makes perfect sense, right?
Something that might not seem to make as much sense is how pilots deal with flying through turbulence. If you've ever been on a plane in the midst of turbulence, you know all you want to do is get out of there. It would seem like the best thing to do would be to speed up and get through it as fast as possible.
In an address entitled Of Things That Matter Most, Dieter F. Uchtdorf made this point, "What do you suppose pilots do when they encounter turbulence? A student pilot may think that increasing speed is a good strategy because it will get them through the turbulence faster. But that may be the wrong thing to do. Professional pilots understand that there is an optimum turbulence penetration speed that will minimize the negative effects of turbulence. And most of the time that would mean to reduce your speed."
Often in our culture, a take-charge-of-the-situation attitude is promoted when it comes to goal setting or challenging times. The saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," is an example of that. And there are times when that may apply, but not every time.
How often do we find ourselves pushing harder and harder, looking for more ideas of what we can do to get through a challenge or accomplish the next thing? Sometimes we fall into the trap of unnecessarily complicating our lives. This usually leads to feelings of frustration, discontent, or even failure.
Too many times we equate simplifying or slowing down with giving up. We may think, "I'm doing my best and my best doesn't seem to be enough." We mistakenly think that doing our best is the same thing as doing everything we can think of.
But Leonardo da Vinci said, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
How can that apply not only to engineering and inventions, but to the designs of our lives? How can we best utilize simplicity in creating a beautiful, functional, meaningful life?
Despite what some people may think, life is not a race - not against anyone else, not even against ourselves. Remember the phrase "optimum turbulence penetration speed." Every encounter with turbulence is different, so our optimum speed for getting through each of them needs to vary if we want to handle it most effectively. Sometimes we can jet on through, sometimes we need to slow way down.
Know, too, that even when we may be facing the same challenge as someone else, - like this pandemic, or pursuing the same goal, or being successful - we're flying a different plane than they are, so our optimum speed for proceeding through the turbulence will be different. A small Cessna and a jumbo jet do not move through the air in identical ways, even though they're both planes and they're both flying in the same sky.
When we're talking about the rate of our growth, we need to remind ourselves to approach our lives in wisdom and order. There's no need for us to run faster than we're able. We simply need to be diligent. Sometimes diligence looks like simplifying or slowing down.
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