The Secret Within: Chapter 11, The Tree That Lives Forever

The Secret Within is a book I’m writing about the art of finding happiness and peace amidst personal difficulties. 

This is the eleventh installment. Previous installments can be found here.

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11. The Tree That Lives Forever

I used to date a girl in high school who believed trees lived forever. 

This drove me crazy. I would point to a dead tree to prove her wrong. She was unmoved, agreeing the tree was dead. She then pointed to a living tree and claimed it lived forever. No amount of logical discourse could sway her. She was raised in a traditional Japanese family; I wondered if her assertion was a Zen koan. She never explained her rationale, and I finally gave up arguing the point.

That was fifty years ago— In the years that have passed, I’ve come to appreciate her viewpoint.

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist whose research centers on time. In 2018, he published a compact lay explanation of his work in The Order of Time. The book is fascinating, even though the concepts presented are hard to grasp. Here is what I learned: 

-There is no such thing as universal time. The question, “What time is it right now on the moon?” is nonsensical. Space is 4-dimensional. Time is one of those dimensions and can not be extracted as an independent constant. 

-Time doesn’t pass at a constant rate. It slows down in the presence of strong gravitational fields. 

-Here’s the granddaddy of them all— At any given location, there is only an eternal now. 

Was my girlfriend right?

If you think about it, what she said almost makes sense. Once I die, my experience of life ceases, so from my vantage point, I live forever. 

The more I think about time, the more I realize I have never experienced anything outside of the eternal now. I recall former events, but those events are a present memory. Every thought we have of time occurs right now, and right now! The eternal now is all we have, yet that is not how we live our lives. Instead, we fret over the past and worry about the future. Neil Young explains:

“Though we rush ahead

to save our time,

we are only what we feel.”

I’m writing this chapter at our cabin in NW Wisconsin. A tall white pine stands between me and the lake. The tree and myself live forever in this eternal moment! I like the feel of that!

I’ve done a lot of searching in my life. Who am I? What does it all mean? How does one find happiness amidst difficult circumstances? Philosophers have wrestled with such questions for millennia. Surprisingly, many of the answers they found involve time. 

Stress, sorrow, and emotional pain are time-stamped because they are triggered by thoughts that distance us from the present moment. Remove thought, and we find ourselves at peace. Here’s a personal example:

Impatient to graduate from college, I took the four most challenging courses of my graduate program at the same time. I knew I would have to study hard, but how bad could it be? 

Halfway through the semester, I started freaking out; it appeared I had bitten off more than I could chew. I became so stressed I had difficulty concentrating. Mid-term exams loomed large, and there didn’t appear to be enough hours in the day for me to master the required material. 

On a visit home for the Thanksgiving holiday, my father could see that my boat was taking on water, and he offered sage advice, advice I have followed many times since. He told me the present moment was all I needed to focus on. He suggested I construct a detailed study schedule, allocating the remaining time until the exams in discrete study periods for each of the four courses, and then stick to the schedule, ignoring all thoughts and worries about the future. “ Do this,” he said, “then accept what fate has in store for you, knowing you have put forth your best efforts.”

I took his advice and aced all four courses! 

The experience taught me the importance of presence. Emotional pain and stress vanish when complete attention is brought to the moment. Later, I would discover this is the essence of mindfulness practice. 

Stress-producing thoughts are time-stamped. “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.” Learning to attend to the present moment is the secret within.

Trees live forever…we live forever… in the eternal now.

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Installments of The Secret Within can be found here. 

Former blog posts can be found here by subject category and here chronologically. 

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My first book, Towards A Life Well-Lived, can be purchased by clicking this link. Proceeds from sales are donated to Peace In Schools, a Portland, Oregon-based organization supporting mindfulness training in high schools.