Everything is good in its time 051210
When the first mango fruit gets firm, before it even starts turning yellow, there always are some people who are not patient enough to wait. They are seen looking up the tree hoping to be first to enjoy the season’s earliest fruit. The problem is that the mangoes do not ripe before their time comes, and the impatient crew always end up eating the unripe fruit.
Unripe mangoes are not sweet, so these people invent methods to try and make them palatable. Some take a salt shaker to the tree to try to add flavor to these unripe and tasteless fruits. But for those who wait, the mango season will come and the mangos will ripen and they will become sweet. There is no need at that time to use salt to try and make them tasty because ripe mangoes are delicious. But it is only the patient who get to enjoy the ripe fruits.
Fruits just happen to be edible but the reason of their being is to produce young trees for the next generation. These young trees are found in form of a seed. The seed is often buried in some juicy flesh which we enjoy eating. This is practically for the benefit of the tree. If mangoes were not edible, no one would bother transporting them from the tree. That would mean that all the seeds would fall under the same tree and try to grow there, sharing the same resources with the parent plant. The parent would be more advantaged in that it has been developed fully with leaves big enough to absorb all the light needed to make food and roots deep enough to supply all its water needed. The young plants would have to grow in the shadow of the big tree limiting their sunlight supply. All the mangoes produced year after year would fall under the same tree and its seeds would grow under the same tree and fight for the same resources. In the end they would all die for lack of resources and we would end up with no mango trees around. And no one would miss the trees anyway since the fruit would not be edible.
Trees needed someone to carry their seeds to other places to increase chances of survival. To accomplish this they hide the seed inside some edible stuff so that every time you decide to eat your fruit at home you take the seed with you. When you are done you throw away the seed and it grows in that part of the world with greater chances of survival. So every time you eat a fruit and throw the seed away you are helping a plant disperse its seeds.
Now, the reason a plant gives you the edible stuff is because it wants its seeds spread. But these seeds do not develop overnight. On the other hand the flesh you eat on the fruit can be made and developed quickly. So after making a good covering for the seed, the seed is allowed to grow and develop slowly inside. This is a delicate process that gives the seed all the information that will be needed to produce a plant that will in turn produce good fruit. If this process is speeded up, it may not be as efficient as it should be. To make sure this process is not disturbed; the plant makes sure that the fruit is not ripe until the seed is completely developed. That is the time when the impatient ones are hovering, trying to get something out of the tree. Once they pluck an unripe fruit they are shortchanging the tree in that the undeveloped seed cannot produce another tree. If they eat all the fruit before it ripens then there will not be seed for the next generation.
If you want to enjoy fruits, it is important to wait until they are ripe. That way you enjoy them more. Have you ever noticed that in the early stages of producing fruit, even the yellow ones do not taste as sweet? If you wait until the ripening season you will find that even the green ones are very sweet. The sweetness is not in the colour but in the time given for the seed to develop. It is like the tree is saying ‘now that you have waited till my seeds are ready for dispersal, I will let you enjoy the fruit and please, take the seed away from here.’ If the fruit is tasteless you will have no reason to take it away from the tree.
It is the same in real life. There are many things that we want bad enough and we refuse to wait for them to reach maturity, as a result we get bitterness from them. No matter how much ‘salt’ we add in to try and make them palatable they remain tasteless. If only we were patient enough to wait for the right time we would get the best out of every situation. Remember that everything is good in its own time. Do not rush things you may end up tampering with some important seed formation which would in the end produce more fruit for your own enjoyment.
