Les Olives: Part Seven

Lessons from the Olive Grove

I hope you enjoy the final installment of the Les Olives series, about my trip to the South of France in March 2024 to help prune my aunt’s 130-tree olive grove. For those of you who missed the first six installments of Les Olives, start with À Bientôt! Les Olives to catch up.

I am currently working on a book based on this series that I hope to have published later in 2025. I’ve learned so many lessons from those seven beautiful days. I hope you have enjoyed the entire series!

Also, don’t forget, in celebration of the Winter Solstice I’m offering my Enlightened Omnivore annual subscriptions at 50% off until December 21st. Enjoy!

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl

I looked across the olive grove after a week of pruning, the brisk air full with the smell of fresh cut olive shoots. It’s hard to describe the subtle fragrance, but when I closed my eyes, it smelled like the color green: fresh, herbal, slightly sweet with just a hint of the peppery esters that give fresh-pressed olive oil its bitter pungency.

Half of the trees were neatly groomed, branches loosely piled like hair clippings around a barber’s chair. The fading light from the setting sun filled the canopy of each newly pruned tree, so that the silvery green olive leaves seemed to shimmer in the breeze. A storm was blowing in, and the temperature was dropping. I could see my breath as I snipped away the last of the suckering branches. Wiping a drop of sweat from my brow, I was filled with the pride of having accomplished something with my own hands.

I did it. I completed the pruning of 72 trees, a little more than half of the grove, in just four days. The other half of the trees would patiently wait their turn to be pruned next year, completing a two-year cycle that my aunt had started more than four decades ago, when I was just an infant. As the accomplishment sunk in, I wondered how many more prunings this grove had in it; one hundred? Two hundred? Olive trees can live a thousand years if well taken care of, long after I’d be gone.

Walking up to the house, I pulled my coat tight around me. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, and the wind was picking up, blowing the olive cuttings along the ground. I wondered if I would be back to prune next year.

I don’t like to think about it, but I’m officially middle aged. And what a start to this long maligned milestone. A few months before, I had closed my business of seven years, a casualty of the Pandemic. Barely able to pay off my debts, and without the energy or mental space to ponder my next move, I hid away, immersing myself in writing, a passion I cherished as a young man.

When my aunt had requested my help with her olive grove, it felt more like a midlife opportunity than a crisis. But maybe I was just deluding myself.

I was about to turn 46, and halfway through my fourth decade, life had already included changes I didn’t expect. New doctor appointments, thinning hair, growing waistline, crows feet, all of those flickers of old age felt relatively harmless individually. But when I stood back from the bathroom mirror and took a long look, the reality sank deep into my achy bones. Age is unstoppable. So how do we do it gracefully?

Hard Work as Medicine

One thing I did notice on this trip, the pruning labor had been medicine for my middle-aged mind. I looked down at my hands, blistered and dirty, and smiled at how I’d held up despite the hard work. Boy did I love every minute of it. Proud that I could still do several days of manual labor, I chuckled at the thought of how giddy I felt hoisting myself up into an olive tree to trim the top most branches, or how I hand-sawed the trunk of an unruly fig as big around as my leg. Nothing like climbing a tree or chopping wood to reinvigorate the boy inside.

The unruly fig tree I cut back, stacking the wood more than a meter high.

Learning from the Master Gardener

This entire trip has had a simple rhythm to each day: hard work followed by deep conversation. At the end of each work day, my aunt would grill me about my efforts in the yard, her eyes bright with curiosity despite her 94 years. Over generous pours of wine, the conversation would meander through topics as broad as politics, history, religion, and science, demonstrating her secret to longevity: an insatiable desire to learn something new every day.

Like the oldest trees in the grove, my aunt has weathered countless seasons, reinventing herself many times throughout her life. She certainly has her tendencies – a woman of a different age, a different epoch. Yet beneath that tough exterior lies a mind that refuses to stop learning.

Eager to know more, I asked for the secret recipe of old age. She didn’t hesitate: curiosity and sharing were key. And she should know. A well-respected academic, my aunt has worked to perfect these principles her entire life, treating each day as an opportunity to both teach and learn – a practice that has kept her mind as vigorous as the olive trees of her grove.

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” C.S. Lewis

Shedding Dead Weight

During one of our evening fireside chats, I opened up about my midlife struggles, and shared how I was enjoying Julia Cameron’s Artists Way, and how it was reinvigorating my creativity. My aunt opened the book and read the core principles.

“When we open ourselves to our creativity..”

I was surprised when my aunt pushed back immediately. She asserted it wasn’t about being open. “Open is too passive.” Instead, the secret to renewing life in this “second half” was about shedding the former self, the old ways, and creating space for the new.

She began to preach that shedding, like the skin of a reptile, allows one to grow and rejuvenate. The old skin can actually hold you back in your mature years. Creativity alone is not enough to make us resilient for the next 50 years. One must cast off the barriers–or "barricades" as she called them–and push through those cultural, familial, and social restrictions on the border of our previous skin.

I thought about my current skin. For the first half of life, it helped nurture and protect me. It gave me moral guardrails, aspirations, and goals. But now a middle-aged lizard, maybe I had outgrown my youthful scales. That old skin was no longer serving me. It was time to cast it off so that growth could continue. A slow but steady seasonal growth, like that of the olive trees.

Growing Toward Light

“It also doesn’t hurt to have younger friends,” my aunt added. She has surrounded herself with a chosen family of loyal and loving individuals many years her junior. They come to visit her throughout the year–who wouldn’t in this paradise–and to be enriched by her presence. She shares with them, and they expose her to the next generation.

It turns out, this instinct to nurture future generations isn't just kindness – it's vital for our own wellbeing. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson found that middle-aged people live longer and more fulfilling lives when they embrace what he called "generativity": the active nurturing of and contribution to the next generation. The alternative–known as stagnation–is a state of disconnection where people in the second half of life become isolated from and fearful of society's future.

In the olive grove, with each clip of my secateurs, I realized I was learning the lesson of generativity firsthand. Every cut, every careful decision about which branches to keep and which to remove, was a reminder that I still had something to offer, to invest in, even for future harvests I may never see.

I’m only beginning to understand that middle age isn’t about fighting the current of time, or challenging the virtues of history. Instead, it's about learning to be more like these olive trees, shedding the dead wood of previous year’s, reaching always toward the light, and adapting to each season's changes, while contributing to future abundance, even if I won’t taste the oil.

Perhaps this is the grace in growing older: finding peace in being one link in a much longer chain, contributing what I can to a world much larger than that of my youth, that stretches far beyond my own time.

This week my aunt called me from France. “Are you coming back to prune the olives this spring?”

“Bien sûr!” But only if they’ll continue to prune me as well.

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