May 01 2019 Tree of Attraction

This is the sto­ry of a tree and law of at­trac­tion.

In some parts of Ger­many there is a tra­di­tion to put up a dec­o­rat­ed birch at the porch of the beloved girl. This “Maibaum” (May tree) is a col­or­ful proof of af­fec­tion to the la­dy who’s ini­tials or name is de­pict­ed on the wood­en heart that is at­tached to the tree.

The prac­tices sur­round­ing it could prob­a­bly fill a book. Most of them I could not tell you, though, be­cause where I live, erect­ing the ana­log of a christ­mas tree in May would be con­sid­ered strange.

Not too long ago, I heared of all of this for the first time, too. To­geth­er with her sub­lim­i­nal (un­in­ten­tion­al) dis­ap­point­ment about this prac­tice not be­ing cel­e­brat­ed here. Ap­par­ent­ly it means a lot to her.

Now imag­ine it’s crist­mas and you want a christ­mas tree, but noone around you knows what that is. Then you’ll have a great chal­lenge find­ing a spruce/pine/fir. Where the May trees are com­mon, there are places to buy them eas­i­ly and af­ford­ably.

Here where I live you just can’t do it. I have no way of trans­port­ing such a tree, no mon­ey, es­pe­cial­ly no time and en­er­gy to waste on this kind of thing. I don’t even know what is ex­pect­ed of such a tree! Is a 1 m twig okay? Or would it need to be 5 m (that does hap­pen and is not an ex­ag­ger­a­tion, but not the norm).

… and many oth­er ex­cus­es I start­ed telling my­self as if to con­vince my­self that I didn’t even need to try. She’d be worth it, of course and for sure, but it’s just not vi­able.

“But you should at least call those three leads to see if you could get a tree. You’re just afraid of leav­ing your com­fort zone.”—a voice in my head wis­pered provoca­tive­ly.

And there start­ed my jour­ney for leav­ing my com­fort zone in a way I had not done in quite a while. Nev­er has it been so clear to me that all my ex­cus­es are just an at­tempt of let­ting me off the hook to avoid hav­ing to do some­thing un­com­fort­able. It made me fierce and all this turned in­to a chal­lenge of me ver­sus my­self.

I start­ed to see birch­es ev­ery­where, in the back of my mind vague­ly con­sid­er­ing the idea of felling one (which would have been il­le­gal, btw). Fo­cussed in this way, I de­cid­ed to take a few de­tours while jog­ging to places I guessed an­oth­er birch could be.

Eight hours of think­ing about trees lat­er, I came across the fol­low­ing scene:

I could not be­lieve my eyes! Some­one had very re­cent­ly cut of a big chunk of a birch. I will end the sto­ry here, as it would con­tin­ue for quite a while longer—while I did put up a dec­o­rat­ed tree, I end­ed up do­ing a minia­ture ver­sion of my orig­i­nal idea once I even­tu­al­ly re­al­ized my over­ly high ex­pec­ta­tions of what would be nec­es­sary for a cute surpise.