What a forest can teach us about time

A fallen tree can look like the end of a story. Walk past it a season later, and the story has become more complicated. Moss holds its surface. Fungi appear and disappear. Small plants find a foothold in softened wood.

The tree has stopped growing in one sense. In other senses, it has become a place where growth can happen. A forest makes it difficult to maintain a simple distinction between productive things and things that are finished.

Several clocks at once

Different processes run on different timescales. A leaf responds to changing light. A seed may wait for the right conditions. A tree adds growth that is easy to overlook from one day to the next. Soil forms through changes too gradual for a casual visitor to see.

Those overlapping rhythms are one reason repeated visits can be so rewarding. A woodland that looks still in a photograph is full of activity. The visitor's timescale is simply not the only timescale that matters there.

This is an observation, not a productivity prescription. Trees do not exist to teach us how to answer email. But spending time among processes we cannot hurry can loosen our sense that everything meaningful ought to produce a visible result by Friday.

Practice returning

Choose one small patch of a nearby natural place and return to it. A park, a verge, or a single tree will do. Record what is actually there: a color, a texture, a new shoot, a missing leaf. Try not to turn every observation into an explanation.

After a few visits, differences begin to appear. You may notice that what seemed permanent is changing, while what seemed unremarkable has a pattern. Curiosity grows out of this relationship between familiarity and surprise.

The fallen tree is still on my usual path. Each time I see it, it looks a little less like an object and a little more like an ongoing conversation. I plan to keep coming back.