The Analogy of the Fallen Tree
Over a tree’s 3 billion+ second lifespan, it will spend about 1/1,000,000,000th of its life falling. The rest of the time it spends growing, soaking in sunlight and carbon dioxide, growing leaves and sending potentially hundreds of millions of seeds out into the world. I’m going to try to be grateful for the full lives of the trees when I see them fall but also grateful for the people who clean up the branches and debris so I can walk on a clean sidewalk. People touch our lives in unseen ways every day. Being grateful for those actions can be transcendent for our lives.
I think we’re all familiar with that old saying, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, does it still make a sound?” I’m still pondering on that, but today I’ve been thinking a lot about trees falling because it’s been extremely windy in my neighborhood. And whenever wind really whips through town, large branches and whole tree get uprooted or broken.
Do we give enough presence of mind to contemplate on what an enormous event having a fully-grown tree fall? Many tree species live for several hundred years. Some live much longer than that. Other quick growing species often flame out before they reach the century mark but lets say that across the tree world the average life of a tree is a hundred years old give or take a couple hundred years. It can take just a few seconds for a massive tree to tumble to the Earth. That means that over the trees 3 billion plus second lifespan, it will spend about 1/1,000,000,000th of its life falling. The rest of the time it spends growing, soaking in sunlight and carbon dioxide, growing leaves and sending potentially hundreds of millions of seeds out into the world.
I don’t think there is anything comparable in our human existence that is that brief in retrospection to the immensity of time trees spend standing tall. But yet, I see fallen trees all the time and most of the time I only give them a second thought if I’m trying to climb over or under them on a trail. I don’t give the respect that such an event probably deserves. And natural events are happening all around us all the time, and we can’t be conscious of all of them. And that’s okay.
But I wonder if we could take a lesson from the significance of a falling tree that could help us appreciate those of our own species a bit more. We are all so interconnected whether or not we really like admitting it. The pandemic over the last couple of years has certainly drawn attention to just how reliant we all are on the intricate and delicate web of interconnections that makes up modern society. From the grocery store where we get our food, to the park where we walk our dogs, to our favorite restaurants, church services, concert venues, the energy that lights and heats and cools our homes, to the gasoline or electricity we use to power our cars. And that’s a good thing.
Since I don’t have to grow all of my own food, that gives me time to do other things that are hopefully helpful for society in other ways. Most of the time, we pay some price for the goods and services that we rely on to live a modern lifestyle or pay taxes that go towards goods and services that our cities and states and Nations provide. And when we pay for things, it’s very easy to feel like we deserve what we get since we paid for it. While this might be true, I’m reminded of the fact that most modern societies don’t require any of us to grow up to work in a needed profession. As far as I know, there aren’t any preschools for future sanitation workers although our cities would be utterly shut down if sanitation workers didn’t do their vital jobs.
I am a strong advocate of our market economy, but I think we have room to just be grateful for the little things that others do that make our modern lives possible and so much easier than life had been for most of human existence. We can be grateful for the washing machine that does the work that used to require dozens of hours of extremely hard labor every week for a family just within the last century. I completely take my ice maker for granted these days, but I should remember what an incredibly rare treat it would have been to have anything chilled a century or so ago. Ice had to be cut in northern climes, transported by train in straw or later refrigerated train cars and kept in special containers to make it last as long as possible. Now, I complain if I have to wait a few minutes for my ice maker to run a cycle to replenish the catch basin.
Our attention is so spread these days, and so I don’t pretend to expect any of us to pay attention to all of the small gifts that others provide that enrich our lives in small but significant ways. But really that thanks is not for the people who do these things for us because typically we don’t get the chance to thank these individuals face to face. No, this kind of gratitude is designed to make us into a different kind of people. Gratitude is powerful. It is one of the most renewable resources too, because we always have something to be grateful for and whenever we are genuinely grateful, somehow it always brings good things into our lives and helps build a more holistic and healthy perspective on our circle of connections.
So, I’m going to try to be grateful for the full lives of the trees when I see them fall but also grateful for the people who clean up the branches and debris so I can walk on a clean sidewalk.