Large, round numbers have an irresistible allure. Witness our love of anniversaries, or the turning over of a century. It occurred to me recently that I missed a good one. Without realizing it, back on January 25th I climbed the tree for the thousandth time. Or rather, it was the thousandth day since I started climbing, on May 1, 2015. Some of those days I couldn’t climb because we were out of town. But many other days, especially in the summers, I climbed more than once—and on two occasions climbed the tree 25 times following a day I forgot. I would guess the actual 1,000th climb occurred sometime back in December.
This unnoted, momentous event could have happened during a snowstorm; I might have stood up there gazing down at the Christmas lights on the porch of the house through swirling snow and darkness; or it might have been some gray weekend afternoon, a quick climb up and down as we returned from some errand or excursion. Or I may have been up there late at night, surrounded by the hard bright stars of a deep winter sky. Alas, if I had only known! Some small observance seems called for—a jubilant cry to the universe, a precarious bottle of champagne amidst the wind and ice, maybe a celebratory snowball chucked from the top of the tree.
Sitting here now, looking out the window at sleet bouncing off the shoulder-high mound of snow from the roof, I find a series of thoughts flitting through my head.
A thousand climbs—doing anything that many times should make one very good at whatever it is one is doing. Of course, it doesn’t come close to the ten thousand hours that have been suggested to be the minimum for mastery of any practice. If, very loosely, each climb takes five minutes, then it is possible I have spent close to a hundred hours in the tree—and probably have, given the times I lazed out there on a summer weekend reading, or sat there for an hour during a snowstorm, or hung out among the branches with my daughters, talking. A mere fraction of the requisite ten thousand.
But even so, I think—a thousand times, a hundred hours—if I had committed that to some skill, how good I could be! A hundred hours practicing cajon or Irish flute, or painstakingly learning bagua forms, or writing. Or learning to read Italian, which I have always wanted to do. I could be reading Italian!
Steve Kaufman, on his blog The Linguist, notes that the Foreign Service Institute estimates that to achieve basic fluency in a group 1 language, which Italian is for English speakers, should take about 480 hours. I would be one fifth of the way there. And to read a language is much easier than to speak it, so I could be well on my way to reading Italian. I could be working my way through Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees—about a young baron who after being forced to eat a dinner of snails prepared by his sister climbs into a tree and announces that he is never coming down. And doesn’t.
Or I could, in my own small way, be the baron in the tree. And have been.
So instead I think of another tree, Chuang Tzu’s, in the eponymous Taoist text. It is so huge, so bent and twisted, that it is of no use—no boards or posts, no furniture or house can be made of it, its owner complains. Which of course is why the tree still stands. Well then, laze beneath it, Chuang Tzu advises the discontented fellow: “roam boundless and free as you doze in its shade” (from David Hinton’s translation).
The same man grouses to Chuang Tzu about a gourd he grew that was so humongous he couldn’t figure out what to do with it, and in the end smashed it to pieces. In one of the great lines from any sacred text, Chuang Tzu replies, “You’re awfully stupid about the uses of immensity.”
We are all stupid about the “uses” of immensity, nearly as stupid as we are about the “uses” of the miniscule. (A tree is the essence of both, from lichen to branchspan.) Why not have made a boat of the gourd, suggests Chuang Tzu, “and go drifting across rivers and lakes?” And so I go drifting across the lake of the sky in my treeboat.
Time—the time I have spent climbing, or perched among the branches—is itself as immense as this gourd, as useless as this tree. And as knotted, intricate, and full of character. Not the kind of time you can make lumber out of, or furniture. Time of no particular use (I cannot read Italian). But time hard won from the demands of life; and its own kind of boundless roaming.
I don’t know if I will climb the tree another thousand times; but I have climbed it today, and I will climb it again tomorrow.
