Headroom

 

                                        Our old friend Max

A few years ago, an organization called TreeVitalize planted trees along one side of 10th Street in the next town to the north, and it was quite an improvement for that light industrial/retail strip which before did not have much to brag about aesthetically.  But...they were planted on the side with the power lines.  They have since grown, as one would expect them to, right up through the telephone cables on their way up to the electrical ones at the top.  In a few more years, the trimming trucks and crews will be at work chopping them down to size (that is, mutilating them).  Trees need headroom, as do people and even businesses

Businesses usually have to grow and evolve to survive, sometimes becoming very different in the process -- Toyota began with making looms! Harley Davidson just introduced a line of electric bicycles, seeing a growing market where their traditional one is shrinking.  The railroads, faced with a major change in freight movement with the advent of the Interstate system, forgot they were in the transport, not just rail, business for a while but eventually learned to move cargo containers and even the trailers from semi trucks on their flat cars.   Others just can't adapt. The formerly premier auto brand Packard sold a few of their last model in 1956 then sadly left the stage.  They did have new product ideas, but not soon enough, and lacked the capital to implement them in any case.   No headroom, like the trees. 

Humans can start life with opportunities or make them for themselves. They can be limited to little growth by their economic or social situation, the latter often being a matter of religious or political restraints throughout their environment wherein everything is prepackaged; further exploration or thinking not being encouraged or even tolerated.  A few, regardless of where they came from, like daVinci, Alexander the Great, Michael Jordan or even entrepreneurs Musk and Branson, are phenomena, seemingly never running out of headroom.  Wildly successful artists like Picasso, the Beatles or Zane Grey (90 still-popular books to his credit) sought out new experiences, forms of expression and life experiences in order to keep growing and remain vital, brushing limitations aside.  All of them had a rough beginning in poverty and/or rejection, but saw the blue sky above them, and not a ceiling.