You Are a Tree

Do you know who you are? You are a freaking tree.

You started as a seed and you were very unsure. The underground seemed pretty scary, even terrifying to you. You stayed in place for quite some time. You stayed there for long enough to figure out that there may be a chance that if you don’t move, nothing will change.

So, you finally decide that you should stretch the very fabric of who you are into one direction. You do not go very far. You are very cautious, after all. You take a look behind you. You see your starting point. It is not a very long way from where you began.

You are already tired. You only stretched perhaps half an inch and there is nothing else in view. Only dirt.

You’ve started to get to know the dirt. The dirt is all that is around you, so you became friends. At this point in time, there isn’t much separation between you and the dirt. So, you stay still, together.

Later comes the day when you are ready to take another stretch. You extend yourself past the second point. You make it to about another half an inch. Still, nothing in sight but dirt.

Do you see where I’m headed with this?

Look, I don’t know a single thing about how a seed turns into a tree. Nor can I attest to whether or not the seed is friends with the dirt. I just love to think about our symbiotic universe through the lenses of a children’s series narrative (for some reason).

All I can say is the seed only saw dirt for a very long time during its life. It had no clue that one day it would sprout out of the surface and become a magnificent tree.

Yet, in life, we have this saying: “what you see is what you get”.

Huh?

So, you mean to tell me, that there is nothing beyond what we see in front of us? That there is no possible way, that something beyond our own point of view, exists?

I called that nonsense a long time ago.

You see, I have spent a lot of time in the dirt. In fact, I am still very much in the dirt. But I do not only see dirt.

I see all the progress I’ve made. All the little connections I’ve made by trying to do things differently. I keep trying to do things in different ways each and every day. I’ve done this for a very long time.

When you do things differently, your brain makes synaptic connections. Think of it as the little branches forming in the dirt to make a tree.

Some connections seem random. Like they have zero correlation. But others interconnect. They interconnect because they relate so they make those connections stronger. We tend to remember those connections better because they reinforce the previous connection and they validate each-other.

When we start making those intertwined connections, we begin to build networks. Just like all the branches intertwined together in the dirt, our brains will relate one metaphorical branch to another and we begin to have ideas.

When our ideas are strong enough, we begin to push past the soil into the light. We are still very small at this stage in time, we may just be a twig (again, not a tree expert). We finally dare to show our face to the world. It took a lot of work.

The thing is, those synaptic connections you make in your brain, you need to somehow replicate them into what we call the “real world”.

To do this, you need to start making those connections in the “real world”. This can look like starting a project, building a relationship, writing an article and publishing it on Vocal, etc.

All of these things you do, these connections you make, they get you one step further. They may not always relate. Sometimes you need to revert back to the information you have carried in the soil to bring it into the world. You did not spend all that time in the dirt for nothing, after all.

The dirt; the soil, is nourishing. It prepares us for what’s ahead. Some of us spend a little more time in the soil for this reason.

So, you allow it to help you and you refer to it to help build connections in the “real world”. Then, you keep on pushing. You become stronger as you push and begin to grow branches. Then you grow branches off of those branches and you finally become a tree.

We must remember, the tree would have never become a tree if it wasn’t for the continued nourishing of the soil.

It is important to stay grounded in your foundation while you reach for the top.

Hope you enjoyed this article. Feel free to give it a heart, share and/or a tip to support my growth as a writer. You can also check out my other articles posted here. Peace.

-Val