First a little disclaimer: This is a life lesson post not a gardening post. In fact, I really know nothing about raising roses, but there happens to be a rose bush right outside our backdoor with the prettiest pale pink blooms!

My father-in-law and I were walking around the yard the other day, and he was identifying a few of our plants for me. When we stopped by the rose bush, he pointed out that some of the branches had dead ends. “Trim these off,” he said. Apparently the plant will just waste energy trying to get rid of the dead itself instead of concentrating that energy on growing. But the gardener can help the plant refocus its energy and get the air and room it needs to grow stronger simply by trimming it up.

So while sipping coffee on Saturday, I took a sharp pair of garden scissors out and trimmed our roses. And as I was doing so, I started thinking about what a great metaphor this was.

The need to drop dead weight is seen everywhere in nature. In fact, as we grow our brains actually do something similar. Synaptic pruning is a process that happens during childhood in which our brains drop superfluous cell connections while the important connections become a lot stronger.

So here’s the question: does your life need a little pruning? Are you wasting too much energy dealing with dead weight? We make so many choices every day about where to set our focus and what will occupy our brain space—whether it’s deciding how to spend our free time or worrying about something we cannot change. But are we picking the things that will give us what we need to grow stronger?