The Hedge Apple

Whack! Man that hurt! Where am I? Why is there two of everything?

As I held my face in agony, I turned around to see the source of the pain. It was my good friend, Adam, standing there in complete horror. “Et tu, Adam?”

We were on our 4th grade retreat at a local park and Adam had been throwing hedge apples into the woods for no apparent reason. One of them slipped and rocketed right at my face leaving me looking like Rocky after taking a right hook from the Russian. After I came to, I was actually a little proud of the black eye. It made me look tough for the ladies. All except for one lady, my mother…who was not impressed. The problem was not so much the misfortune of getting hurt but rather that the next day was school picture day. The irony never fails to crack me up when telling this story.

The next day, I put on more makeup than a circus clown and was coached by my parents on how to sit so as to conceal this black eye in the ultra important school photo. After all, this will go down in the history books. So I sat at a 45 degree angle and the snapped the picture. The black eye was hidden but there was nothing they could do about the buck teeth.

The interesting thing about that moment is that it sparked an association in me that took years to correct. If you look at my school photos every year following, there was still an angle in my pose. In fact, if you lined them up, it would almost work as a flip book until senior year where I am finally looking straight into the camera. This only happened in school photos. Any other time I was in front of a camera I looked straight on with no problem.

As I was looking through all the yearbooks it occurred to me just how powerful situational association is and how much of a negative impact it can have on real life matters. In this particular case, the only thing that was affected was a few bad school photos which if we are being honest didn’t have much potential in the first place. But then my mind wondered to business and life as it often does.

How many times have I put off a phone call because the last time I had a phone call under these circumstances it didn’t go well? How many times did I not take a risk because I had a bad experience the last time I put myself out there? How many habits were created out of a necessity but then never evolved and matured because I failed to do an assessment?

I’m not sure why I eventually snapped out of taking pictures at an angle. I’m sure a random photographer may have just asked, “Why are you doing that?” And that was all it took.

It may be tough to spot and may even take the help of a coach or close friend, but doing an audit on your life could reveal many things that you have been neglecting. Identifying the source may be all you need to snap out of it. In my case it was a hedge apple. In yours it could be a sports injury, embarrassing moment or even a traumatic life event. Once identified it was because of the hedge apple, I no longer fought the urge to turn left during photos. I would laugh it off and look straight on.

The villain of this story actually became the hero in the end. Adam is now the principle of the school. I’m told he banned the throwing of hedge apples on all retreats. It’s a good move. Apples of all kinds have been getting Adam in trouble since the dawn of man.