Tree Time

To continue an earlier point, the idea of 'expanding horizons' is more than just a whimsical diversion from the gritty business of everyday life. To the contrary, its fundamentally organic nature can be seen in a familiar example from nature. As is well-known, a tree is an accumulation of rings, and such growth is a simple but precise model of horizon expansion. The application to human experience is not immediately easy to appreciate, but that is probably due to some too superficial ideas about the nature of Time. In day-to-day activities, we orient ourselves to the 'times' of a clock, but that hardly captures the Temporal quality of the experiences themselves. They usually entail a rush from situation A to situation B, so Time seems be a succession of discrete points. A more reflective consideration of experience notes how these points are separated by other points, and so on, until the succession of points turns into a line. But more abstract specualtion has asserted, for example, that the line is actually a circle, or that there is no line, but just one ongoing point, or that the lines, the points, and Time itself, are just illusory. In contrast to all of these, tree time is cumulative, and insight into our experiences shows that our lives are, as well. Sometimes, one can easily miss the rings for the tree.