The Oak Tree

I planted an oak tree a couple of weeks ago. I’ll come on to why I had an oak tree to plant in a bit, but I was surprised how interesting the planting turned out to be. Because quite unexpectedly, the very act of kneeling down out at the front of my house on the edge of a little village in the South East corner of our little country and planting a little 6-inch tree in the soil attracted more attention than usual from the usual stream of passers-by.

To give you a bit of context, I live right on the edge of a big forest, and the path into said forest is right over the road from my front door, and on a sunny Sunday like we had that particular weekend, there are always a fair few people who park up in the village to wander into the woods, perhaps walking their dog, perhaps walking their kids [we all know that kids need the energy running out of them just as much as any dog], or perhaps just walking themselves with their friends, and they all go past the front of my house.

And so when I’m out there of a weekend doing classic middle-aged man things like tidying the hedge or putting stuff in the back of the car to take to the tip [our British word for the local recycling centre, and a mainstay of classic weekend activity for those of you who aren’t Brits and are wondering what I’m on about] or taking Jack [10-year old human male] to football training or Ben [14-year-old human male] to rugby training or Ruby [3-year-old canine female] for a walk [yes, this is the rock-n-roll lifestyle I lead] I often end up in a lot of smalltalk chitchat “lovely weather we’re having” conversations with strangers.

More than I’d ideally like, if I’m honest, because in my heart of hearts I’m not really quite as outgoing and gregarious and social as I might seem. [I’ve discovered over the years that I’m what can be described as an “extroverted introvert”, in that I’ll happily talk to anyone and everyone but I’ll also resent the fact that I have to and will be exhausted from the energy the interaction requires. But that feels like another blog…]

This time, though, it was different.

For a start, virtually everyone who came past felt the urge to point out to me what I was doing, mostly with a mixture of surprise and delight in their voice:

Oh, you’re planting an oak tree!

[Which actually doesn’t happen that often, when you think about it. It’s not often complete strangers totally succumb to the urge to tell you what you’re doing at the time. Imagine how odd the world would be if they did. “You’re walking down the street”. “You’re sitting on a train”. It would end up feeling like you were in some weird kids’ TV show where adults dressed in primary colours point out the blindingly obvious to an audience of tiny, no-nothing humans.]

And then, as a follow-up, virtually everyone would say something about how long it would take to grow, often with a bit of low level comedy in there:

I’ll have to come back in 30 years to see how it’s going.

That’ll look lovely in 100 years!

Quite a few people talked about their own mortality…

I won’t be around to see that fully grown…

Or indeed, about mine:

That’ll be one for your grandchildren to enjoy!

When the first person stopped and pointed out that I was, indeed, planting an oak tree and that yes, it would be a long time until it was fully grown, I said something along the lines of…

“They say that the best time to plant an oak tree is 100 years ago, and the second best time is today!”

…which got a great reaction, and so I basically recycled versions of that same line over and over with everyone who came past, honing my delivery each time, every new set of people blissfully unaware that they had unknowingly wandered into my perfectly curated and planned out set-piece interaction where I knew what they would say and what I would say before anyone said anything, all people playing their parts perfectly, my supporting actors never knowing that they weren’t the first to point out what I was doing, or experience the seemingly off-the-cuff remembering of an old quotation.

I knew I’d picked that line up from somewhere, but because I couldn’t remember where and because the people I was talking to probably wouldn’t know either, by the end I was making out it was a famous quotation which I knew and making up who had said it. Thomas Jefferson sounded realistic, as did Benjamin Franklin [not sure why the American forefathers leapt to mind, but I vaguely remember something about one of them chopping down a tree and then lying about it… or not lying about it… or some such thing; if you’re from that side of the ocean perhaps you can enlighten me!], and Lord Byron, for some reason, and then of course you can always drop in Churchill because all quotations sound like they come from him.

[As it happens, having put an appropriate amount of effort into researching this, it turns out it’s none of them: it’s actually (as far as I can ascertain, anyway) from an old Chinese proverb, and it’s not about an oak tree specifically, it’s about trees in general, and it’s not 100 years, it’s 30 or 20, depending on where you look. But as Mark Twain/Ernest Hemingway/Jonathan Swift/etc might or might not have once said: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.]

And so, as the sky started to bruise and late afternoon made its lazy way towards early evening, I kept myself occupied with making up new attributions for this “quotation” and had a bunch of very small, but very enjoyable and (for me, at least) playful little interactions, all ending with an “enjoy your walk” from me and a variation on “enjoy your tree!” from them.

[I tell a lie: there was one more negative exception which proved the rule: a very prim and proper woman who took the time to point out that because of where I’d planted it, in 50 years time “that tree” would be getting in the way of the electricity and telephone wires criss-crossing above and I should perhaps plant it somewhere else. Knowing me as you do, dear reader, you will be most proud and a little surprised to hear that I didn’t simply say “oh sod off you grumpy old bag”, but instead said that in 50 years the tech would have moved on and there probably wouldn’t be wires above and anyway I’d be long dead by then and it wouldn’t be my problem to worry about. Which, considering she was maybe 25 years older than me, probably gave her a little jolting reminder of her own mortality and, perhaps, made her consider whether being such a naysayer was really how she wanted to spend her Autumn years. But we didn’t get into that next conversation because by that point it was clear we weren’t going to be friends anyway.]

And as I stood back, brushing the soil from my hands and admiring my handiwork – this funny little baby tree in the middle of a patch of grass, containing every piece of genetic information it needed to become a huge oak towering over the house – I had quite a deep feeling of accomplishment, and even a little pride.

I’m someone who plants an oak tree, with the knowledge that I won’t be here to see its majesty. It felt like a pure act of altruism, of outward-looking connection to the future. To people I’d never know, who would never know that I planted this tree, all those years ago.

Perhaps, in 60 or 70 years’ time, my own sons might visit the village in which they grew up, perhaps bringing their own grandchildren, or great-grandchildren even, and say “I remember when my dad planted that tree”. And they could all point out that as it turned out it had really got in the way of all the electricity cables and made a right mess of things, and remember how the great power cut of 2078 that had all been traced back to me planting that very tree back in 2024…

Last Sunday, I have to say, they were both pretty underwhelmed. But they could see I was chuffed to bits with it so they kept their lack of enthusiasm to grunts of “it’s not very big” and “is that it?” and we left it at that.

So why, I hear you cry? Why was I planting an oak tree, of all things?

Good question. Well done you. There are a few reasons, and they probably make the most sense if I explain them in reverse order…

This little oak tree had actually been living in my house for a few weeks by the time it eventually got to experience the wild wonders of the world, but had arrived just before the twentieth day of the third month of this year which I’m sure you will have spotted is indeed my birthday.

If you’re also wondering why it took so long to plant it, well that’s symbolic of how my brain works – an often constant cycle between “I must do that important thing” followed by a gap, followed by a reminder and “shit I forgot to do that important thing” and then a gap and then repeat. A cycle between frustration and guilt and self flaggelation which is only broken by actually just doing the important thing which often doesn’t even take that long once I get down to it.

This is how it was with our oak tree. When it arrived it was just a little twig with roots in a bit of soil in a little plastic bag within a little hessian draw-string bag, and it sat on the windowsill in the kitchen [you know, the one behind the kitchen sink, by the window]. Every time I noticed it again, perhaps once a week or maybe a little more often, I’d go through the cycle of self flagelation above and give it a little drink from the kitchen tap, and think “definitely this weekend”. Then I’d forget all about it until the next time.

But this is an oak tree, remember? These things last for hundreds of years, and a few weeks being forgotten about by some bloke with a fuzzy brain wasn’t going to stand in the way of that.

So it grew leaves anyway. Beautiful, perfect little oak tree leaves like the ones you’d get if you googled “oak tree leaves”. Leaves of life, and determination. Leaves that demonstrated that this was a living thing, demanding to be planted so the roots living in a hessian draw-string bag could dive down deep into the earth to find their own water source.

Putting together all this information, and if you’re not only observant but also somewhat sleuth-like, you may well have worked out that this little oak tree friend of ours was indeed a birthday present.

The next question your inquisitive mind might ask could be “why on earth would someone buy you an oak tree sapling as a birthday present?”

Well, this particular oak tree was a surprise present from the person who’s been coaching me for the last couple of years, another Sarah in my life [alongside my wife and my big sis], who lives on the the other side of the world in Australia. And when she sent me an oak tree, she knew that I would know the meaning behind that gift.

Which takes me right back to the chronological start of this (surprisingly long) tale.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’ve had my struggles with mental health over the years, and you’ll also know that I’m now thinking that some of those struggles could well be connected to undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which I had diagnosed and then treated from last year.

So over the years I’ve occasionally found myself right in the middle of the deep dark forest [you can jump into the Ted Lasso story around that idea here if you feel the need], where everything seems tough and scary and you don’t know which way to turn. You know how that feels too, I’m sure. I hope you’re not in there right now.

But as Coach Lasso pointed out, fairy tales do not begin, nor do they end, in the deep dark forest. “That son-of-a-gun always shows up smack-dab in the middle of a story”. Things do get better, and things do work out.

What I’ve found is that it’s not until you start to find your way out, coming out into the open air, seeing the sky and the clouds and the sunlight, that things start to get some context.

I’ve also found that there is a huge temptation, at that point of being able to look back, to curse the forest for all its darkness and danger and discomfort.

And that’s where the oak tree changed things for me, and why it’s become such a theme for me, and why Sarah gave me an oak tree for my birthday, and why planting it meant more to me than it would have if I had planted a beech, or ash, or horse chestnut.

Because the oak tree doesn’t represent the forest. The oak tree isn’t the forest, or part of the forest. The Oak Tree is a poem.

[Listen, if you’re sitting there reading this and thinking “oh for crying out loud, what is he banging on about”, or possibly words with the same meaning but with more expletives, then I get it. I wouldn’t blame you if you decided that you’ve had enough of this story which started with some amateur horticulture and has ended up here, talking poetry. It’s been quite a journey to this point, I grant you. But going through the forest often means you need to take some strange turns along the way, right? So stick with me. It’s worth it, I promise.]

It’s a poem that my yoga teacher, Lucy, read out during one of our yoga therapy sessions just as I was coming out of a deep dark forest of my own. It’s called, simply, The Oak Tree, and it goes like this:

The Oak Tree

A mighty wind blew night and day
It stole the oak tree’s leaves away
Then snapped its boughs and pulled its bark
Until the oak was tired and stark

But still the oak tree held its ground
While other trees fell all around
The weary wind gave up and spoke,
“How can you still be standing Oak?”

The oak tree said, “I know that you
Can break each branch of mine in two,
Carry every leaf away,
Shake my limbs, and make me sway.”

But I have roots stretched in the earth
Growing stronger since my birth
You’ll never touch them, for you see
They are the deepest part of me.

Until today, I wasn’t sure
Of just how much I could endure
But now I have found, with thanks to you
I’m stronger than I ever knew.”

It’s that last verse that got me. The idea that I could look back not with horror of what I’d come through, but with gratitude for what it showed me about myself, was brand new to me.

I’m sure that you, like me, have the tendency to look back at difficult times and revile them. Perhaps you’ve even put a whole calendar year in a box marked “CRAP” and now you talk about it like it something real and evil rather than just the social construct that it was. 2023 sucked, right?

Whatever the situation you experienced [the one you’re thinking about right now, for example], whether it was a difficult friendship, or a toxic work environment, or a bereavement, or a break-up, or just the end of an era, the urge is there to put it in a neat little box and then burn that box in the eternal fires of Hades because the wind was battering you and your branches were breaking and your leaves got carried away and you were swaying all over the place and you just want to forget about it.

But here you are. You made it from then, which seemed so huge and impassable and desperate, to now. And like it or not, you learnt something along the way.

About your values.

About your friends.

About what’s really important to you.

About yourself, and what you can endure.

It feels a bit unfair perhaps, but you don’t get to learn those things when you’re wandering carefree through the meadows. You only get to learn those things when you’re being tested. So whilst you may not feel like it now, perhaps one day you might even look back with a kind of gratitude, for showing you those things.

For showing you just how deep your roots go.

I’m not saying that’s an easy shift. But once made, it’s a shift that can release some of the tension you’ve built up around those more difficult times. It certainly allowed me to shift the way I look at the bad things that happen. Bad things will always happen. Of that there can, I’m sorry to say, be no doubt. But how you look back on them? That, dear reader, is always up to you. You didn’t get to decide what happened. But you do get to decide what place these things occupy in your mind, and what energy you give them. You do have choices now.

Me? I chose to plant an oak tree, to symbolise all these things. Time moving inexorably on from a made-up, one-sided story we tell ourselves about the past, through the reality of right now, towards another fantasy which we call the future. My own mortality within that. Friendship and support. Trials and tribulations. Resilience, and choices. My own roots. Stronger than I ever knew.

Not bad for a 6-inch high twig with a dozen or so leaves.