The maple story

🍁The maple story🍁

 

 

Someone asked me one day, “Does the maple fall, or does it blossom during the autumn season?”

Hearing the word ‘maple’ always brings the image of autumn, the grey skies, fallen leaves, and sunsets. It reminds me of all the elements that are vanishing into stillness as if the very soul in them is slowly dissipating

Also, I have been told by my parents and teachers that maple falls when it's autumn. So I answered boldly

“Of course it falls”

But that someone again asked me, “Well, that’s the standard answer everyone would give, isn’t it? That the maple falls. Try thinking unconventionally.”

It’s really hard to change the palace of your conventions and let the pillars of your amassed knowledge, which hold the palace upright, fall to mere facts when an unprecedented, unconventional traveler enters our conventional world.

Our conventions bound us to the known, to the grounds of our past experiences because we can feel it beneath us but when the wings of time lead us to the future, we aren’t able to give up on those grounds, we aren’t able to trail the clouds of reason and inference.

And so I was left on my grounds of belief and I said, “I can’t think anything distinctive”

And my constant questioner, that someone smiled and replied, ‘True that the maple falls. It’s as true as the existence of stars and moon.

But this maple is one of the only species which enjoys falling, you know, which enjoys its approaching end. In the gloom of the autumn when all the leaves are reflecting the color of the sun, yellow and withered; the maple stands grand with red or orange leaves that will also fall like other leaves yet they bring the color of their life out, one last time. 

You admire a plant when it blooms and not when it’s dying out. But all the people admire this maple when it’s about to fall. They appreciate the beauty of the fallen maple leaves not the fallen rose petals.

So, although, philosophically but doesn’t the maple intensify its beauty when it was supposed to cripple? Doesn’t the maple bloom when it actually falls?”

And this short speech of an unconventional thought collapsed my palace of conventions.