Wise old words of wisdom are maybe not so smart

There is an old, wise proverb. It says: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

Feel free to use that line any time you want to look like a deep thinker. But what does it mean?

I think it’s supposed to mean that even though you’ve procrastinated for way, way too long, it’s OK. You can still get started on that thing you want to do. Yes, you should have started a long time ago, but you didn’t, so here we are.

Instead of telling a person in this situation that they blew it and failed life, be Zen. Tell them the tree thing.

Like if you’re trying to save for retirement. As the wise proverb goes, you should have started saving back when you were cranking Hootie and the Blowfish during your morning commute.

You didn’t know. You thought you’d always be happy working and making enough money to pay the bills with enough left over at the end of the week for a dozen beers and a frozen pizza.

Now you’re older and you can see your retirement ahead and you wish you could go back, turn the volume down on Hootie, and tell younger you that he is going to become very interested in things like golf and Florida in 35 years.

The best time to start saving was 35 years ago. The second best time is today.

Same with weight loss. I’ll start after Thanksgiving. I’ll start after Christmas. I’ll start after Pancake Tuesday.

Here I sit, online shopping for bigger shirts. I should have started eating better and exercising months ago. I didn’t. But the second-best time to start is today.

Well, that’s the ancient wisdom. But, really, if the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, wouldn’t the second-best time have been 19 years, 364 days ago? Following that logic, today is not the second-best time to plant a tree. Today is way down near the bottom of the list. Today looks better than tomorrow but barely.

I don’t mean to poke holes in age-old wisdom but I was thinking about this proverb a lot recently. This past summer I assembled a plastic storage shed (with help from my daughter). It’s pretty good.

We finished it and put our feet up. There were about 80 screws left over and a whole bunch of metal pieces. The instructions told us this was the “snow load kit.”

But, it was summer. We were hot and tired.

I looked at the snow load kit for the rest of the summer. It kept getting in my way.

I even used the snow load kit as an excuse to get me out of other obligations. Mmm. I can’t. I have to do that snow load kit.

I didn’t install the snow load kit until, well, until we had a snow load and I had visions of my fancy new plastic shed crumpling.

With the first big snow, I was out there with my shovel trying to scrape snow off my shed roof to prevent a collapse. And that same weekend, I got to work.

It was cold and I had no helper to hand me screws or, to be honest, to do all the work while I pretended to read the instructions. This could have been done months earlier, with my kid there to do everything, er, I mean help.

The snow load kit includes 80 little screws. Yes, 80. And these screws don’t get screwed into holes. They go directly into sheer metal roofy pieces (technical term).

That means that every single one of those 80 screws slips at least three times, falls to the shed floor and causes me to curse loudly.

So, ya, the best time to build your shed snow load kit is in the summer, when you build your shed and have lots of help.

The second best time is not today. It’s a little later in the summer. It’s still warm. Help is still at hand.

The third-best time is a little later. Then maybe on a nice fall day. Then a cooler fall day. Anyway, today is far from the second best day. It’s maybe the worst day. Other than the day after your shed roof collapses under the snow load.