DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 111, 1 August 1927, Page 12

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

ORCHARDS AND OLD MEN

(Copyright, 1987. J

QONTRARY to the general idea, it is youth that values time most. Youth wants immediate results. It doesn’t want to wait. It wants to hurry things up. Utopia must arrive year after next at the latest. It wants immediate success, immediate productivity. Ten years seems an age. It is the older man who ventures most frequently upon long-time projects. The owner of a large orchard was interviewed upon the possibilities for success in his line. When he explained that it takes about ten years for a new orchard to become productive, the reporter ventured that only young men could be *interested. For others, the time would seem too long. “That is where you are wrong,” he was told. “It is the old men who plant orchards. When a man is in his twenties, ten years seems a long time. He is looking for quick returns. lam forty-five and just beginning to learn that it doesn’t take ten years long to roll around. Time isn’t such a factor to me any more.” A man’s real usefulness in the world begins when he has learned this lesson. Projects that take years to bear fruit are the only ones that do the world much good. A (usually) reliable gauge of the worth of a thing is the time it takes to achieve it. The crop that springs up in a night dies while a tiny tree-twig is sprouting; the fruit-fly that becomes a great-grandfather in an hour passes away with the ticking of minutes. It was said of a certain famous writer that he worked as if “he had eternity to finish in.” Time and perfection are ever at odds, and to choose the immediate is to choose the inferior. Where time is constantly a factor, steady climbing become# frantic clambering to the detriment of the work at hand. When a man ceases to hurry he does his best work.