As we navigate this thing we call reality, it serves us well to occasionally stop, take a moment and ask ourselves the following question: "Am I seeing the forest or am I looking at the trees?"
It seems like every other day there is some new quick-blurb article going viral in which some half-assed understanding of a complex scientific study is dumbed down into a Twitter-ready headline. These headlines are designed specifically to pull you in. To seduce your mouse and fingers into a harem of click-bate. This is fine for entertainment value but these headlines, blurbs and articles are preying our our very human instinct to look at the trees. They're designed to distract you from seeing the forrest.
We can understand the trees. We can climb them and take a nap under them. We can touch them. But the forrest is vast and in order to see it we must stop and take that moment we keep avoiding. Life has patterns and predictable variables. We've even had success in predicting the future using math. A common pattern in reality that I've noticed is this: The faster something changes, the faster it has the potential to change right back.
I like looking for patterns. It's what drives my art and it is why I believe artists and scientists enjoy each other's company. We, students of both disciplines, enjoy dissecting reality; we just use different tools and languages. I remember clearly the very first time I became aware of the "fast come & fast go" pattern. It was the mid-2000s and I was active in my college fraternity. Living in a house with a bunch of guys and a layer of testosterone you could cut through with a knife can make for the perfect laboratory setting of a control group for an amateur psychologist.
I don't know who introduced the idea of taking Creatine into the group but, within a semester, every other brother of Gamma Phi Epsilon was woking out with the fitness-aide. That summer, everyone was freaking huge. It felt like overnight I was surrounded by various Hulks doing keg stands. I don't know who stopped taking it first but, by Christmas, everyone had shrunk down into nerdy Bruce Banner.
I've been at war with obesity my whole life. Thanks to some less than ideal rolls of genetic dice, my body fights me when I try to get active and my metabolism shuts down when I look at a slice of pizza from across the room. Science has arguably not found a strong enough explanation for why our bodies try to race back to our higher weight after we loose a bunch of pounds. If you've ever tried a fad diet, you're all to familiar with the disappointment of watching the scale inch back up after a few weeks of glorious progress. This is why nutrition and fitness experts encourage us to lose no more than a couple of pounds a week. They've known of this pattern for quite some time. They've looked at the forrest.
But I continue to find this pattern to be true in all aspects of life. So much so that if a fairy godmother (or a powerful Hollywood producer) was to offer me overnight fame and fortune, I would respectfully decline. Reality seems to look for a quick way to crash that overnight empire. Justin Bieber, the perfect example of overnight fame, seems to be walking a never-ending tightrope of self-implosion. Another popular example of this in the entertainment industry is the story of writer/director, Troy Duffy.
What goes up, must come down. The further you throw the ball into the heavens, the longer it will take to return to Earth.
Now I'm sure that for every example I give, we can find a counter. But as I said, this is a general pattern I've noticed. When taking a moment to look at the forrest, this is how it looks to me. And that is the reason I cherish the long, hard road it has been to get to where I am. It is the same reason I am grateful for the future. Small, incremental change. Patience. One foot in front of the other.
My friend, Mike Sager, is a writer with a thousand and one stories about his adventures as a journalist working for the likes of Esquire, GQ and The Washington Post. There was this story he told me that I think about almost every day. There was an interview subject (Marlon Brando?) whom he was trying to track down. Story was that the subject had retreated to the mountains so there Mike finds himself, climbing a damn mountain to interview this guy. I'm sure I'm butchering this story but those details aren't important. The takeaway was this: Most of the time Mike spent climbing this mountain, he was looking at his feet, watching with care where he was stepping next in order to avoid a fatal tumble to his doom. Every once in a while, he would stop and look up. He would gaze upon this incredible vista, the sun and sky painting the horizon with all the glorious colors of God's canvas. Mike would look at the forrest for a few moments in awe and then return to the trees, the rocks and steps just beyond his own feet. He stopped every so often to see how far he'd come, but the majority of the journey was spent watching his own feet.
It's not black and white. None of life is. I, dear reader, have zero desire to convince you that my general observations of life are indisputable facts. I share this with you, in part, so that perhaps my experience may inspire one or two of you to push past some bolder you may have stumbled across on your journey. But mostly because putting my journey to words is my own tool for seeing the forrest. After writing this piece, I'll be back to looking at the trees. I have a photo assignment I need to finish by Monday.
Fret not if you've been working on your craft, project, business or art for two years and haven't made it as far as you'd like. The longer it takes, the deeper your roots go into the ground. The older the tree, the hard it is to cut it down and the deeper it's ancient foundations go into the earth. It's okay if things take a long time. They should. There's a stronger chance the changes we work towards will be longer lasting.
A tree is easier to cut down than an entire forrest.
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