Posts published in “Real Life”

Continuing on the forest theme, sometimes you come across a tree that you think is just dead. This is a good time of year for it: the foliage is falling, so you can more clearly see all the trees, but some of them still have leaves, making the ones which are completely barren stand out. Often the bark is black and cracking, or all the small branches have fallen off, leaving just a stick. I've twisted a fair few of these out of the ground with one hand and added them to the growing border that is creating our path.

But others are bigger - the kind that tree experts call "widowmakers". You can walk up to one, and just push on it, and it may start to fall - but you get more than you bargained for. The tree's momentum, once started, cannot be stopped, and its weight - even if rotten - is enough to cause a cascading chain reaction, breaking off healthy limbs and knocking over other trees on its way down. These slender systems, dead but balanced in a semblance of life, crash with unexpected impact, ringing out through the forest as they land.

It may be fun to knock over a system you don't like, but the crash can kill you, and it can do a lot of damage to other people as it falls to rest.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Well, I don't have pictures of the trees that fell over, but I do have vines that I've pulled down, which looked twenty feet long but proved to be fifty feet of falling debris that also could kill you.

Sometimes when working on a vast project it transcends "you can't do it all at once" and moves into the territory "it's hard to know where to get started". One such project is trying to bring the woods in our house under control. Apparently the previous owner's yard folks had been trimming the landscaping around the house and throwing the cuttings into the forest, so an entertaining variety of invasive ivy, grapes, something like holly, and other vine-like things were progressively destroying the trees of the forest.

It's been a process. The yard looked like wilderness once you got past the landscaping and was nearly impassable. But, after we were forced to take out the first of our dying trees (NO, well, full disclosure, a delivery truck took out the FIRST of our trees when it ran into it) when it got consumed by ivy one year and threatened to fall on the driveway, we decided to start the multi-year project of rehabilitating the yard.

We took out that tree, then took out another half-dozen. We hired goats that year to eat the vines down to the ground, then followed up with chainsaws and clippers to sever the roots of the vines climbing the trees. The goats decided they were done with it and didn't eat any new growth that came back up, so the next year, we hired a guy to bring in a "mulcher" (really, a bobcat with a giant grinder on the front of it) to clear out runways through the landscape, leaving islands of greenery for the deer and other animals.

Then, we started on the paths.

Our idea - and I'm not saying it's a good or feasible one - is to have paths running through this forest. This would take way, way more money than we want to spend on it - but we're patient, and have time. So, slowly, step by step, we've been taking fallen tree limbs and creating borders for the paths.

Drawing that line is an act of magic - even if it's just with an old rotten piece of wood thrown onto some leaves. As soon as the line is drawn, you know what's inside it, and what's outside it. You know which plants you can leave alone, and which weeds need to be pulled up. And once you've done that, you have an even larger area of order, which brings increased clarity, which brings more opportunities for order.

I don't know if we will ever complete our plan to rehabilitate the forest.

But at least now, there are paths we can walk.

-the Centaur

Often as we go through our lives we encounter situations where we feel, "I can't take this." There's a lot of subtle reasoning behind this: our emotions are derived from whether we think we can cope with losses (secondary appraisal), how well we think we're doing in relation to others (relative deprivation) and our disproportionate fear of short-term losses compared to short- or long-term gains (myopic loss aversion).

These are reasonable fears. A sufficiently large short-term loss can kill you. SO it's rational to worry more about those. And we can't see ourselves from the outside; looking at how others are doing around us as a guideline is also reasonable. And we certainly don't want to tackle situations we can't cope with.

But we're often wrong about all of that. We often catastrophize potential failures as being far worse than they are, our comparisons with others can become unhelpful if not pathological - and since we unrealistically distort threats, we often far underestimate our ability to cope with problems.

When real shit happens, it sometimes puts things into perspective. For me, I used to complain that grad school was hard, and it was, but it wasn't as hard as Grandmother breaking her hip after midnight on Christmas Eve. I used to complain that work was hard, and it was, but not as hard as getting the call that you've lost your mother. And preparing for a complex business trip can be hard, and maybe it is, but it is not as hard as discovering that you misread the expiration date on your passport just before flying.

When any of those things happen, you have to stop fretting about it and just get on with doing it. Now, admittedly, some people can break down when that happens, but for me personally, I find that my emotional fretting turns off, and my mind just focuses on what I need to do to get it done.

Case in point: above is a tree.

My wife and I used to walk under the limbs of that tree almost every night that we took a walk. You'll note you can't do that anymore, because the tree started leaning. As best as our tree doctors can figure, many of the trees that the previous owners planted on the property were planted with the transport basket still on the tree; while the tree would remain healthy for a while, eventually the roots get too big to go through the mesh of the basket, the roots turn inward, the tree becomes root-bound, and the whole basket turns into a big ball bearing as the tree gets bigger and bigger ... and unhealthier and unhealthier, preparing to fall.

This one began leaning a month or two back, but we didn't notice it until one day it just was too low to walk under. Shortly thereafter we saw that the tree was beginning to tear up the ground as it twisted in its great ball bearing. We've done this dance before; this isn't the first tree we've lost to this process, or the second.

Now, after I left Google, we deliberately dialed back our work on fixing up the yard - which, due to the year and a half the house sat between owners, needs a lot of work. It's been a juggling act as I spun up my consulting business, and fretting was involved as we traded a goal to fix this broken thing against an aspiration to improve that thing that versus a desire to maintain this other thing. We're blessed to have this nice yard, but at some points, it can feel like we might be more blessed with a small apartment.

But once we started whacking ourselves in the head with that tree limb we used to walk under, we had to focus, make a decision, and get it done. We had to get on with getting it gone, as I said in the title.

It's sad to lose the tree. But, if there's any silver lining in that, it feels good to know you can solve a problem when you need to. And I find focusing on that is really helpful, because the next time something happens, you can remember times you solved those problems, and use that emotional resource to solve the next one.

-the Centaur