What can we learn from a tree?

Freehold it’s a small and quite township in New Jersey, probably best known due to Bruce Springsteen, who spent there his childhood. You can taste the legend’s smell everywhere through grocery stores and BBQ restaurants, but there are also a lot of beautiful and natural parks.

I was walking lonely, deeply focused on my past, but also trying to chill and get new inspirations for our new menswear collection. Then I find a young tree, solid and alone, standing in its natural beauty. It reminds me of the giant California’s sequoia and also a very beautiful passage I read some years ago, taken from a very interesting book written by César Hidalgo, visiting professor at Harvard University - Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies:

"Consider a tree. A tree, in its semi-"frozen" state, is a computer powered by sunlight.

A tree reacts to the length of the day, running a different program in the summer than in the winter.

It figures out when to shed its leaves and when to sprout new ones.

A tree processes the information that is available in its environment."

It’s a very intense and meaningful thought, which inspires me at many different levels. Are we still able to slow down, to breath and learn from each other despite our differences?

At KEN BRUSH Corp. we are trying to commit more on personal feeling and emotional intelligence, not only to spread a good work life balance environment, which sometimes by the way it’s not enough. But also for the beauty of thinking itself. Open discussion sessions and motivational team building lectures, probably represents only the tip of the iceberg, but we think it will worth the effort to build a better and serene workplace every day, starting from little things. Again:

“A tree does not have the consciousness or language that we have, but it shares with us a general ability to process information.”

This is probably one of the best lesson we can learn from a tree.

Ken Brush