THE TREE OF WORLDS
There is a tree at the end of my street which I like to look at and I call it The Tree Of Worlds.
The name came to me a few weeks ago as a I was looking at it in the evening light. The way its broad trunk becomes thick limbs and then finer branches and finer and finer until sprouting its leaves…
It reminds me of worlds. As in parallel universes. The idea that you can start with one timeline but with each choice, with each unpredictable quantum event, reality splits off into different dimensions where each of the different choices was made.
And if a choice is one of those branching points, then it’s also a tree of lives. At the base, there’s the trunk, which is wide and full of the potential we have when we’re young, to choose all kinds of things to explore and be and do. And as we move higher up the tree and age and explore what come to seem like different directions, our options get narrower and narrower until… a leaf. Which I guess, in this metaphor, is leafing the mortal world.
At the very bottom, under the soil, are the roots. Those are the choices of parents and their parents that give us the things we start our lives with. Opportunities, connections and the legacies of people we’ll never meet that make up the now innocuous details of modern life.
But some of that’s kind of a lie, maybe sometimes a comforting lie, that idea that we cannot revisit past choices or do over. Because we always have so much choice. More than we sometimes let ourselves imagine. We can always go back to being as curious and creative as we were when we were young in both body and mind.
I’ve been in a state of flux for a while and when I look at this tree sometimes I think of the different choices I’ve made that lead me here, and the choices I could make, and where they’ll take me. I think of the choices I didn’t make and I wonder if the person who made them, in their own world, on their branch, I wonder if they’re as peaceful and content as I feel when I look at The Tree Of Worlds.
But mostly I just look at the tree.