Crooked trees

My neighborhood is a little old, which comes with a few perks. My backyard has trees, for one thing.

It’s the kind of feature you don’t think is a luxury until you look around. These days in suburbia, developers take out everything in sight on a piece of land for convenience. Then, once all the townhomes are copied and pasted, they have landscapers plant new trees where the old ones stood in neat, little rows.

This is the most quaint of flexes, but my yard has the full canopy. In there, you can find trees representing the whole lifecycle: full-grown ones, acorns, saplings, pines, oaks, dogwoods, stumps.

I’m mostly oblivious to their biology, but I’ve lived here long enough to see a progression. Something I think is a weed turns out to be a young tree making its way in the world.

That’s a hard thing to do.

Often, we picture trees in the textbook form—long, straight, and uniform—but life has more randomness than we can grasp.

Recently, I’ve noticed just how many trees aren’t straight at all. Some lean, some zigzag, and some are downright cattywampus, and yet they grow strong and rigid despite coming up in the shadow of much larger trunks.

It’s easy to wonder how such things could ever survive, but reality is forgiving every now and then. They were following the light all along.

As humans, we have a bias for consistency. We struggle under the weight of narratives, as if everything in our lives can be neatly ordered in an arc of beginning, middle, and end. Most people, if you get them talking long enough, are a little revisionist with their history.

When I started writing for myself again, I was afraid I’d slip into an embarrassing intellectual trap: cognitive dissonance, the act of holding two opposing thoughts you can’t possibly reconcile.

I persisted anyway because inconsistency from one moment to the next is inevitable. Life makes different demands of us at different periods, and time makes fools of us all. Talk out of both sides of your mouth enough, and who knows, you might end up president one day.

Businesses, in particular, contradict themselves all the time. You can start a mission-driven one, but the nature of your survival will likely put you at odds with that mission. Sometimes, I think the reason companies come up with core values is so they can set them aside at the earliest opportunity. No one knows what’s ahead.

Each of us is living out a story, and that can only be realized through hindsight. A large reason why I resist categorizing whatever this is is because I’m writing my way toward something. I’m doing it live.

Storytelling is entirely different. To tell a story effectively, you must focus on the vital details and leave out extraneous information so your theme remains the clearest signal.

Life is more complicated than that. If you actually included every single detail in a story, you’d arrive at a non-sequitur no brain can process. We all know someone who rambles through stories with no discernible thread, reaching back to the Big Bang with no orientation to the world around them. Stories are compressed for the sake of meaning.

When I was young, I believed everything happened for a reason. I still do, but now I don’t pretend to know what it is. I’m fortunate to have had a fun collection of past lives: crime reporter, chocolate factory worker, agency copywriter, the b-word. No singular thread exists but helpful echoes pop up from time to time.

When you’re just starting out, you can’t cling too strongly to any particular path. What you want now won’t be what you want a decade from now, not if you’re doing it right anyway.

My alma mater Elon University has a tradition of giving oak saplings to its graduates at commencement. Mine died immediately, which looking back on it, says a lot about my aspirations at 22, but I think the intention still stands. Curiosity is something you nurture, the eternal becoming.

I have a bend coming my way. I’m not seeing about a girl or chasing a bag this time, but I’m changing and who I am laughs at who I’ve been. It can be daunting to look at a new path and think it won’t make sense to anyone. In actuality, it’s refreshing to free yourself from that constraint.

A big part of writing—and life—is letting go of old ideas to make room for new ones. It’s a good rhythm: theme, variation, departure. Don’t be afraid to redefine who you are or add a new chapter to your story. Stasis doesn’t exist in nature, let alone any contrivance we humans could come up with.

Grow in whichever direction the light comes from. Be a tree.

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