Under the Oak Tree – A Journey

PART ONE

Life is a journey, not a destination.  Since that fact is startlingly clear to me this morning, I would like to invite you along for a few moments.

For many years I had a tradition on my birthday.  On that special day I would find an oak tree, rest beneath it, and carefully review the last year of my life.  It was always an arduous process, requiring much introspection.  Sometimes it was painful, excruciatingly so … and sometimes it was joyous, breathtakingly so.   It was always worthwhile.

At its worst, however, introspection can be a supercial process;  just a series of questions you ask yourself.  Sometimes you can find answers, but often they merely lead to further questions.  This process can be palliative, but it is seldom curative.

What questions might you ask yourself?  Here is one author’s list:

What happened?
What was I trying to achieve?
What went well and why?
What didn’t go so well and why?
How did it affect me?
How did it affect others?
What were the consequences (positive or negative) for myself and others?
What could be done differently next time?
Would this change improve the consequences?*

These are very good questions.  But for me at least, they invite more questions.

PART TWO

As a child, I loved a poem written by Joyce Kilmer, called Trees. Until this morning I could only recall the first few words:

“I think that I shall never see,
A poem lovely as a tree.”

Today I revisited the poem, and when I did so I not only gained an appreciation for trees that had been missing from my childhood, but I discovered an all-inclusive answer to my Oak Tree questions.

The final words of her poem are as profound as they are beautiful:

“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”

My goal for today is to commit all of Joyce Kilmer’s words to memory, so that the next time I sit under my oak tree, I will remember the last question to ask myself, and where to seek the answer.

–Michael R. Stewart

*(I cannot remember the source of this list, sorry.  Like so many other useful bits of wisdom, I found it on Twitter.  If it’s yours, please let me know and I will give you the credit.)

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