I’m not a “plant person.” I have a few houseplants in my condo, but they’re working plants that inhabit my domain to purify the air. Only the most hearty and tolerant plants (e.g., aloe, snake plant, succulents) have a long-term relationship with me.
My father loved plants. He had a deep understanding of their needs. Several times he tried to pass along to me what gave him enormous pleasure, but I just did not connect with it. I did learn the obvious: plants must be watered, get enough sunlight, and be repotted once they’ve grown. I also learned that plants need to be pruned, which seems counterintuitive. It doesn’t strike me as logical to cut off a plant’s branches to make it grow bigger and stronger, which is the reason to prune a plant.
My father explained pruning involves cutting off certain branches (There’s an art to knowing which branches to cut, but I never paid enough attention to learn.) so the plant can use its limited resources to make stronger branches.
For example, a healthy rose bush will produce too many buds. This leads to overgrowth and creates a drain on the plant’s resources. Left unchecked, most of the flowers will survive but not thrive. Therefore, the gardener must make the difficult decision to prune the good buds to redirect the flow of nutrients to the best buds. (My father may have taught me more about plants than I thought.)
Just as a rose bush needs to be pruned to produce beautiful roses, we too should occasionally prune our respective life.
Envision your life as a fruit tree, be it apple, peach, pear, or orange. Each branch is an interest, activity, relationship, and accumulation for your future. Each branch requires energy to bear fruit. Some branches may be dying, diseased, broken beyond repair, or tangled with other branches. Airflow and spaciousness between branches are essential.
If you pruned the bad and sometimes the good for the sake of the best, what would happen?
We all have a finite amount of time and energy. Considering who you are and where you are now, are you spending the right amount of your resources where they’re needed and need to be? Or are you holding onto situations and relationships that are extraneous, broken, frustrating, or lifeless?
Tough questions, I know.
Everyone has dead branches taking up space.
When you have an over-full life or feel overwhelmed a lot of the time, it’s usually a sign that you have too many branches. Your energy is too diffuse to sustain everything. If you prune back non-essential things, you provide more energy to the remaining activity branches. As a result, overwhelm decreases, and happiness grows.
Cutting off the dead branches of our lives makes room for growth. There’s more space for opportunities and people better suited to you, as well as you’re freeing up time to pursue passions and look after yourself.
Early into the pandemic, COVID (actually government restrictions) pruned branches from my life, as I’m sure it did from yours. At the time I didn’t realize some of the branches being pruned were unhealthy. For instance, I have this need I can’t shake to compare myself to others. As a result of lockdowns, social distancing, working from home, and staying within my “bubble,” there were fewer people around me to compare myself to, thus envy and negative self-talk quickly dissipated.
Then there’s COVID’s most crucial lesson; it taught me more about getting unbusy than any number of seminars could. Things I thought I “had to do”—that turned out I was just convincing myself I enjoyed—were simply shut down.
“Life pruning” can be painful, which is why we rarely, if ever, deliberately do it. For the most part, we let life prune for us (e.g., death of a relative or friend, job termination, nature destroying our home). Only when someone or something is gone do we finally realize how much it meant to us, or how much energy it was taking from us to maintain, or how harmful it was to our well-being. Often, when we look back after one of “life’s pruning” we realize we benefited from the loss. There’s a truism in the adage, Everything happens for a reason. COVID happened for a reason, if for none other than to slow us down and prune our lives.
The stoic philosopher Seneca said it best, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Over the past two years, COVID has pruned many things from our lives. The two most significant:
Relationships (family and friends)
Mindless consumerism
There was also the pruning of jobs, resulting in millions re-evaluating their career choice and path and losing loved ones to COVID.
Initially, you may only feel COVID’s pruning pain. Sometimes it takes time before you can see that the branches COVID cut off were unhealthy. When non-essential retailers and restaurants were ordered to close, I quickly realized how much of my money I was spending frivolously. In contrast, there were friends I missed at the beginning of the pandemic, but as time passed, I realized how much easier it was without them. (If you feel better when someone’s not around, that’s a telltale sign.)
COVID gave me the gift of “letting go,”—which is pruning. COVID gave each of us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start over.
Golf was a huge surprise for me! Prior to the pandemic, I was a religious Saturday morning golfer with a regular golfing buddy. Then my go-to golf course was mandated to close, and I found my Saturdays free. I filled this newfound time with writing I’ve been putting off. However, here’s the head kicker given my love for golf and how much it’s part of my identity, when restrictions lifted and I could golf again, I didn’t. COVID had pruned golf from my life and gave me the gift of time to write and now I plan to keep the extra time to write. In 2021 my golf clubs never left my storage locker. I don’t expect my golf clubs to see the light of day in 2022.
By saying yes to one thing, which in my case was golf, I was saying no to another thing, writing. Thank you, COVID, for pruning golf from my life and giving me time to write, which I get more enjoyment from and find to be therapeutic.
(fingers crossed) In these last weeks and months, of the pandemic, before something resembling normality returns, you might want to ask yourself, “What do I want ‘normal’ to look like?” Then start preparing for new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life—maybe even prune a few more things from your life. The more space you create in your life, the more things that you truly need, like time to write, will find their way to you.
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Nick Kossovan, a self-described connoisseur of human psychology, writes about what’s on his mind from Toronto. You can follow Nick on Twitter and Instagram @NKossovan.
The Canadian government says it will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses to fight the mpox outbreak in Congo and other African countries.
It says the donated doses of Imvamune will come from Canada’s existing supply and will not affect the country’s preparedness for mpox cases in this country.
Minister of Health Mark Holland says the donation “will help to protect those in the most affected regions of Africa and will help prevent further spread of the virus.”
Dr. Madhukar Pai, Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health, says although the donation is welcome, it is a very small portion of the estimated 10 million vaccine doses needed to control the outbreak.
Vaccine donations from wealthier countries have only recently started arriving in Africa, almost a month after the World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
A few days after the declaration in August, Global Affairs Canada announced a contribution of $1 million for mpox surveillance, diagnostic tools, research and community awareness in Africa.
On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said mpox is still on the rise and that testing rates are “insufficient” across the continent.
Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said donating vaccines, in addition to supporting surveillance and diagnostic tests, is “massively important.”
But Kindrachuk, who has worked on the ground in Congo during the epidemic, also said that the international response to the mpox outbreak is “better late than never (but) better never late.”
“It would have been fantastic for us globally to not be in this position by having provided doses a much, much longer time prior than when we are,” he said, noting that the outbreak of clade I mpox in Congo started in early 2023.
Clade II mpox, endemic in regions of West Africa, came to the world’s attention even earlier — in 2022 — as that strain of virus spread to other countries, including Canada.
Two doses are recommended for mpox vaccination, so the donation may only benefit 100,000 people, Pai said.
Pai questioned whether Canada is contributing enough, as the federal government hasn’t said what percentage of its mpox vaccine stockpile it is donating.
“Small donations are simply not going to help end this crisis. We need to show greater solidarity and support,” he said in an email.
“That is the biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic — our collective safety is tied with that of other nations.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
