As I Verbally Process, My Tall Friends Listen Without Reserve
Please note: this essay contains mention of suicide.
I’m extremely fortunate. While some people have only one or two confidantes with whom they can share their troubles and musings, and others don’t have that many, I have hundreds of close, intimate friends with whom I can divulge my concerns, innermost thoughts, and ruminations. These friends are very tall but wordless — always listeners — and they await my arrival through the week from their spot in the woods.
They are of the oak, pine, maple, and tulip poplar variety, and I love them.
They know everything about me, and hence, they’ve all signed non-disclosure agreements. It’s what they’re willing to pay for access to my endless verbal descriptions of every detail of every floating thought in my head throughout every walk I’ve taken on the trail by my house. (Maybe not every.) They know they’re lucky.
Their only struggle is they don’t have arms and hands to write out the story of all my stories to try to sell the movie rights to Warner Bros. — but they couldn’t anyway. Remember the non-disclosure?
Too bad, trees. Not to be gruff or anything.
There are many ways to process the thoughts in our heads. Some think them out. Others write them out. And still others talk them through, from start to finish, creating a better understanding of new options for both action and thought. While I do all three, I sure enjoy the verbalizing technique.
My only trouble is that there aren’t other humans so readily available with whom I can process my thinking. No problem. I have other resources. They live close by and listen at the drop of a hat, and I’ve dropped my hat once or twice, and thankfully I’ve figured this out within half a mile of walking, but if the trees could talk, I know they’d alert me much sooner.
While my tall friends have no words, I can sense their reaction to what I share as I pass by. The other day, I was verbally processing my recent multi-day struggle with sleep, including a night without so much as one minute of sleep, and this was affecting my gut, as evidenced by undesirable stool-related outcomes.
There was a pause in the vibe the trees put forth. I sensed this immediately.
“Sorry. Was that TMI?”
Mmhmm.
I looked up at the giant oak.
“I’ll be more discreet.”
Excellent.
And this is how it goes. I blather. They send forth their reaction. I adjust accordingly.
Sometimes it’s better to be unreserved and real, though, as recently I shared with my leafy friends the heartwrenching news about a young man whom I knew who’d taken his life just days before. Stool issues might be half comical and half TMI, but news like this is the furthest thing from that. It breaks my heart every time. I wasn’t always 100% sure I wanted to continue when I was young. I get it.
I talked this out with my well-rooted friends. They said nothing, but I knew they cared even if they couldn’t understand. Trees don’t experience such tragedies. Humans are, by comparison, complex. A tree’s job is to absorb carbon dioxide, shed leaves, and stand tall with an open ear to our hardships.
In a recent email newsletter from Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, he goes into four common categories of thought that typically derail us.
While the human brain is capable of fantastically amazing things, it also can spin out half-truths and latch onto them for as long as it cares to keep them alive in our minds. From Hanson, in a nutshell, these are: negative all-or-nothing assumptions about others; assumptions about ourselves due to a lack of acting on goals; beliefs about our imagined inadequacies; and assumptions that others will judge us and then reject us.
We all ruminate on festering thoughts at some point. These thoughts are much easier to work our way through if we have local trees who listen as we process them aloud. Thanks to a bark-encased audience, we come out on the other side with fresh and helpful thinking. Trees are what many professionals recommend as therapeutic necessities. Or don’t they? If they don’t, they should. Dogs and cats are a decent substitute.
What I love most about my tree pals is the way they’ve never once given me an eyeroll or cleared their throat for emphasis. They don’t give me a time limit on my babbling. It’s all-you-can-blab with them. They unconditionally accept endless wordiness. I don’t know how they do it, but one thought I have is their ears are located at the top of their foliage, and they can’t quite hear what I’m saying. If so, it works fine for me. I just need a space in which I can think out a new way of being.
When I do this, I arrive back at my house ever so slightly changed, a hint wiser, and a boatload calmer. Metacognitive processing, the act of looking at our thoughts from outside them, is one of the greatest gifts of our brains, in my opinion. The more I do it, the happier and less reactive I become. I can better regulate myself in the throes of our, at times, chaotic existence — or at least in the throes of its mysteries and confusions.
Sometimes I think I can see my botanical buddies winking at me, or maybe they’re winking at each other. I’m pretty sure they enjoy my chatty questioning about the random guy in the Walmart parking lot who might have been asking me something or maybe wasn’t, and I couldn’t quite tell, and this is life as a human among humans.
It’s also life as a human among trees, and over time, the more I tell them, the more I become like them — quiet, still, aware of the sky, life, and time. There’s no way I can thank them enough for that. But I’ll try. With words.
Have a nice rest of your week, friends. I hope you're doing well.
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