In the winter of 2009 my young family did a six month sabbatical and we lived in village in the Cotswolds. When we boarded the plane my marriage was rocky, my oldest son had just been diagnosed with severe ADHD, and I was depressed. But plopping down into the English countryside where I knew no one, and no one knew me, was a transformative experience because I was unguarded and open to what the universe had to teach me. This is a story I wrote about what I learned from an encouter with a tree — how to appreciate the beauty in the mundane. Serendipity is the accidental discovery of something valuable or useful, so I named it The Serendipity Tree. Enjoy!
When I look at these photographs I don’t see a tree, I see a metaphor. They were taken on a magical winter morning that started out with the daily grind of life. While walking my children to school I noticed that everywhere I looked was covered with frost and the ground sparkled in the sunlight as if fairies had painstakingly covered every individual blade of grass with glitter while we slept. I could have gone straight home and done what I always do, attempt to get stuff done, but instead I walked straight into a mystical winter morning unlike any I have ever experienced before. I walked straight into a dream.
Branches and foliage hibernating for the winter were covered with intricate detail in a thin layer of ice standing tall and paper thin, touch it and it would shatter, so I dared not touch. Water diamonds danced across the sunlit river and the air was misty with fog layering the hills and trees in varying shades of grey. Even a spider’s web was a tiny work of art, an ice sculpture that could have been made from threads of crystal glittering in the sunlight. It was surreal, almost too perfect, and I felt as if I had mysteriously passed through a magical force field into a fairy tale.
Then I happened upon a tree. It’s a perfect tree, I thought to myself, I love its shape. The world was serenely beautiful, and I was alone in this vast and breathtaking landscape. But most importantly I was feeling full of gratitude for life’s small blessings that are often overlooked, like ice on a spider’s web, or fairy dust on blades of grass, or the sight of my breath in the cold winter air. I wanted to stay in the moment forever but because that is impossible I took a photograph instead hoping that looking at it would bring back this magical moment.
I mentally snapshot perfect moments like these and store them away to shield myself from the unpredictability of life. I tell myself that no matter what happens I had THIS perfect moment.
My feet were freezing so I pressed on, and after I passed the tree I noticed that the ice was starting to melt and the magic would soon be gone. So I turned around to take in a final mental snapshot of the tree and what I saw was profound, everything was transformed. The fog had evaporated and the tiny ice sculptures that surrounded me on all sides were invisible, there was no fairy dust on the grass, the river was not dancing with diamonds and, most importantly, the tree looked like an everyday tree on an ordinary winter morning — not an extraordinary one. It was as if I had passed back through the invisible force field into the real world again, so I took another picture.
Everything was exactly the same, yet the world felt completely different because one thing had changed: My perspective.
I didn’t think much more about this day until I had the pictures developed and was struck by the stark contrast in the photographs. The tree didn’t look like the same tree let alone the same tree taken three minutes apart, even its shape looked different, only the gnarl in the trunk matched up. As I stared at the photographs I was transported back to that day, how depressed I had been feeling and how miraculous that morning was, how intensely I felt the rapture of life. I thought about how if I had been walking in the other direction I would have missed out on this experience entirely, it would have felt like an ordinary day. As I stared at the photographs I wondered if I’ve been so immersed in the ordinariness of life that I didn’t notice the extraordinary? Have I been coming at my life from the wrong direction entirely?
Yes, it turned out I had been coming at my life from the wrong direction entirely, for quite some time in fact. When I accidentally stumbled upon this day I was suffering from something I now refer to as “The Fairytale Fallacy”, grieving the death of a little girl’s notion of a happy ending. How does one handle disappointment? Sometimes I think this is the most important question of all because the answer determines the ease with which we move through life, and one thing I know for sure is there is no escaping disappointment.
A few nights later I found myself lying in bed throwing a pity party for myself when a thought crystallized. I realized I had choices, and that in itself is a luxury not to be taken for granted. A friend once told me that when you have a problem sometimes the solution is to flip it around, come at it from the opposite direction entirely. So with the image of my tree in mind I started coming at my life from a different perspective. And as I ran through a mental checklist of “my problems” an interesting thing happened, I realized that none of the things I had been naming and blaming were the real source of my unhappiness, for that I would have to dig much deeper. And I realized something else, blame is a quick fix but it is not a solution, its sole purpose is to absolve us of responsibility. As I lay in bed reflecting on this new reality another thought took shape. My life had all the ingredients of a happy life — every single one of them — the only things missing were a little grace and a pinch of perspective.
As I write this I am looking at a framed photograph of the tree, the magical, mystical one. It is in a double-sided glass frame and if you flip it around there is the other photograph taken moments later, but worlds apart, of an ordinary tree hibernating in the winter with blue skies behind it.
Flipping back and forth between these two images reminds me that they are more than just photographs, they are a metaphor for life. They are definitive proof that miraculous is all around us and there is beauty in the mundane, but the trick to noticing it is to live in the moment and pay attention to details.
Looking at these photographs also reminds me that every second of every day we are faced with a choice, we can choose to be disappointed by life and cling to misery, or we can take ownership of our lives, learn from experience, and move forward. But mostly they remind me that the happiness I was searching for was inside me all along.
Serendipity.
These photographs were taken three minutes apart on January 27th, 2009 on the Cornbury footpath in Charlbury, England.
Comments