This photo inspires two opposite thoughts in my mind – one about longevity and one about brevity. This tree stump reveals about a hundred rings. I haven’t actually counted them all, but I think there are around a hundred of them, and that’s not unusual for a tree. In fact, many trees have a far greater longevity than human beings do. Some of them have lived several hundred years. Methuselah, a tree in Eastern California, is reckoned to be the world’s oldest tree, and seems to have been alive for over four and half thousand years. We humans average around eighty years, and can reach just over a hundred in a minority of cases. What enables any living organism to live for many years? One feature is persistence. The thing is nothing stays the same. Objects are not as fixed as we believe them to be. A tree, like any other living creature, is constantly metabolising nutrients, turning some into energy and others into structures such as fibres and cells. It’s actually more true to say that all living things are systems of constant flow and change…..but they look stable and fairly fixed over time. We can identify them, one from the other, not least because of this capacity to retain an internal integrity – a persistence over time.
On the surface of this tree stump is the shadow of a couple of flowers. From the shape of the shadows I’d say they are some kind of allium. If you look carefully you’ll see a few scattered purple petals. The shadows won’t last long at all. A cloud might pass over the sun at any moment and they’d disappear. Or over a few minutes the Earth will turn and the Sun won’t cast the shadows of the flowers in this direction any more. The petals which have fallen from the flower remind us how brief is the life of a flower. They really don’t appear for very long at all….certainly not nearly as long as a tree. Both the shadow and the flower make me think of the polar opposite of persistence – transience. Transience is the other fundamental characteristic of all life. Nothing lives for ever. Even a tree thousands of years old will die. We humans, all within a much shorter period than that. In Japanese culture transience is greatly valued and you can see that most clearly during the season of the cherry blossom, where the national newspapers chart the spread of the blossom from the south to the north of the country, and when thousands upon thousands of people go out to admire the trees, take photos, have picnics, and enjoy the colours.
Persistence and transience.
We need both. And it’s not a matter of balancing them so that one cancels the other out. Reality is a constant flow of change…..but it’s not formless chaos. Very distinct, very knowable, very recognisable individuals appear, live a life, then fade away back into the whole from which they emerged. Isn’t it amazing how we have evolved the ability to be aware of, even to relish, or celebrate, these polar opposites? Persistence and transience.
Heroes Not Zombies 