# 24 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Reading about something is not the same as doing something. Reading a story about Paris is not the same as actually visiting Paris. This applies to every aspect of reading. As valuable as it is, it is no substitute for experience.
The intended audience for this tip is the ardent, imaginative reader. Your mind can trick you into believing you’ve done and experienced something because you’ve read about it. You may convince yourself you’ve learned all there is to know because you’ve read about it. I don’t mean to imply your reading will cause a psychotic break with reality. But the emotional and intellectual engagement stirred by reading good writing creates a world. A real one. And sometimes it’s difficult for the most intelligent to realize that all the things they’ve read about, and therefore felt as if they were present seeing, hearing, feeling, fighting, loving, longing in the scenes and characters is real only in their mind. Perhaps this has happened to you.
I am not being disparaging. Real in the mind is real. There is nothing more “real”. But no one is a trout fisherman because they read a story about trout fishing outside Pamplona. Even if you recall details like the crisp newspapers to wrap the day’s catch in. And regardless whether you can almost taste the dust from the bus ride back to town. Dust you’ll quench with Sangria in the bar in time for the day’s bull running. No, dear reader, reading about drinking red wine won’t stain your teeth or make you drunk. Even when Hemingway is writing the tale.
I always think of two things in relation to this tip:
The first is the scene in Good Will Hunting in which Robin Williams’ psychiatrist character chastises Matt Damon’s ne’er do well savant character. Damon’s Will Hunting receives a dressing down for being so smug. He’s never actually done the things he’s read about. He’s never been out of Boston. Although he could recite all kinds of facts about Michelangelo, gleaned from the books he’s read, he doesn’t know what it smells like inside the Sistine Chapel. Because he’s never been. “You’re Just A Kid”. Williams’ character tells him. He’s never really been in love. He’s merely read about a lot of things. Though he can provide brilliant analysis with his near perfect recall, reading is no substitute for the actual streets of Rome. It’s a fantastic scene.
The second is on a cross-country car trip when I was 20. I had picked up a Frenchman named Dominic hitchhiking from Binghamton, NY, on his way to see a girl in Sterling, CO. After a side-trip to New York City we started west. On the second day, Dominic grew critical of the countryside in his fatigue at seeing the farms and cornfields along the interstate.
As night fell on a long day of driving, my passenger got impatient. He pleaded with me to get out of the cornfields. After seemingly endless miles of nothing but corn, we saw an exit towards a town. Maybe it would be a more suburban, less pastoral view. I could drive forever at that age, but the corn was like a green ocean. I was suffering sensory deprivation. Plus, we were forced to limit our expenditures to fuel and food. We would not waste precious money on a hotel for the few hours of sleep we’d need before heading out again. I either needed to drive on to a rest stop, or find a suitable place.
This is the West
We came off the interstate and I turned off the service road onto a long, wide 2-lane in western Ohio. Mailboxes dispersed on either side marked the corners of front yards as big as baseball fields. Dark, wood-framed farmhouses sat well back from the road. Only occasionally did we see a light in a window. Still, Dom suggested I pull off into one of the front yards where we could sleep. He insisted we could set up my tent beside my Toyota, or sleep under the stars in our sleeping bags.
“What? Right in their front yard?” I said, “Have you lost your mind?”
“Oh, not at all,” he replied in good but broken English, “This is the West, I have read all about it.”
“Oh,” says I, “you’ve read about it. Good. Then you’ve no doubt read about shotguns, too.”
I kept right on driving, headed back nearer the interstate, away from Dom’s temptation to get us shot at or dog bit, and eventually found a dirt farm road leading back into a cornfield where we would be safe and could get a few hours shut eye.
“I have read about it.” I’ll never forget that. Don’t you forget it either.
Invest in Yourself and get the greatest possible ROI (Adobe Stock image licensed to author)
# 52 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Invest in yourself without apology by reading, exploring, learning, exercising.
True wealth does not consist in possessions that can be listed on a will or a homeowner’s insurance policy. True wealth is not a medium of exchange in the typical sense, the way mere money is. Nevertheless, to acquire riches that don’t tarnish, that aren’t subject to the vagaries of ”market forces”, and that keep supplying a return, you must invest in yourself without apology. Here are four simple, yet effective, ways to do that.
1- Read
I count this as life’s most important skill. Unless you read, you only get to try on and live one life. By reading even mediocre writing, you can use your vast imagination to inhabit another world. By reading you meld your mind, with its limited, finite table of contents, with the minds of every writer you sample. You become multi-perspectived.
This is of incalculable worth. For if a person can never see beyond themselves; that is, if they can never see the world from another’s viewpoint and ”put themselves in another’s shoes”, how can they ever see other people as anything but objects to be used?
2- Explore
Reading is a type of exploration, but by this head, I mean that a person should explore their surroundings in a state of awareness that allows for the possibility of unexpected discovery. One aspect of exploration is to see or to experience a common thing in a new way. I try, as much as possible, to go through each day, and even to move about my house, or walk the streets of my neighborhood, as if I’ve never seen them before.
Here’a a tip to help with this mindset. You have never lived this particular day before. And you never will again. Explore it. Mine it. Extract all of the beauty and pleasure and knowledge and appreciation out of it you possibly can. Become an explorer of this day, and find all there is to be found.
3- Learn
If you read and explore you will gain knowledge. The accumulation of knowledge is like a person who, by reading and exploring, notices and collects puzzle pieces. Eventually, the learner accumulates enough pieces to see patterns emerge. Some of the pieces fit together exactly. In some places there are gaps. By arranging and linking and connecting the tidbits of stored knowledge, one begins to see recurring themes.
At some point you will have pieced together enough related knowledge to be Competent in that area. Continue adding pieces on the way to Mastery.
The other benefit is the humility and even the mild melancholia that comes to the one who realizes that his puzzle may never be finished. There is no clear, absolute picture to go by. There will be sections with no pieces that seem to match. The yearning sadness is the unavoidable flip side of gratitude for having learned so much, yet the recognition that there is so much left to know, that may never be known.
Nevertheless, the Learner would never trade what he knows for a trifle like a car, or a house, or another of life’s accessories. If knowledge suddenly became the medium of exchange, he would not give away a single piece of his puzzle.
4- Exercise
I used to believe the most valuable commodity in life was Time. We’re all on the clock, after all. But a shift in my perspective makes me believe that the most valuable commodity is actually health. I would not want to live an innumerable number of days, sick. You may feel differently but consider, if health became the basis of your paycheck, and not hours, how much health would you trade for your pay?
To this end, exercise is the single most important thing I can do to help. Well, that and consuming only as many calories of the highest quality I can afford to sustain life with the energy requirements of my body and lifestyle.
Start by walking. Healthy humans are ambulatory. We walk upright on two legs. I’ve made the incalculably rich discovery that walking is both means and end. It is perhaps the most spiritual physical practice a person can undertake.
In Summary
Invest in yourself without apology. We need you at your absolute best. I’ll try to be at my best for you, too.
What a beauty. Listen closely, you can hear it’s trying to say something. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
It occurred to me this morning that you cannot lie to a tree. Please allow me the attempt to explain.
Since beginning The Overstory, by Richard Powers, trees have become my heroes among creation. I know that seems strange, but my fascination has only grown as I marvel at their presence on this planet and I ponder what they are up to. As one of the characters in the book might say, ”What they do?”
The more I learn about them, and even as I try to share what I’m learning, the more I realize that my learning is taking me backwards so that I can properly start at zero. My preconceptions have to be shattered and laid aside. They are obstacles. I am like a guitar student coming to a Master. ”I’d like to learn to play guitar,” I say. ”Show me what you can do,” says he. I begin to strum through chords I’ve learned, pleased to show off a few rudimentary elements. ”Stop!” he shouts, before I complete 4 bars. ”This is not guitar! We will need to unlearn these mistakes before we can begin.”
This is how it is with trees. To borrow a concept once more from the book,
”You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
The Overstory, p. 439. From Adam Appich, a character who is a psych professor.
Thinking you understand trees, you don’t see them. I mean, you see the shapes, but you don’t see them. It’s the same with the people you race each morning to get to work. You see them just enough to avoid hitting their cars when you change lanes. But you don’t have time to see the people. You don’t have time to look. You understand them. They are going to work just like you are. Knowing that tidbit is enough to stop the quest for any deeper enlightenment.
You see trees about as much as you see people in these cars. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
A weird thought that just wouldn’t go away
I was thinking on these things when I realized that you cannot lie to a tree. I know, that’s a weird thought to have. But you cannot lie to a tree in the same way that you cannot lie to God. Lies will not impact either one. They will remain unmoved, unbent, unbowed, unswayed. The wind will move a tree more than your lies will. Go ahead and try to prove me wrong.
Which of your lies will either impact or impress a tree? (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
I find that so satisfactory to contemplate. You can senselessly cut down a tree. Or you can treat it like a cash crop. You can scorch it with acid rain and blight. You can foolishly clear out the undergrowth that makes up its nutrient bed. But you cannot lie to a tree. In every conceivable way, a tree is above you. It is unmoved. It is unflappable. A tree is nothing but living, breathing, branching, spreading, sharing truth. No liars need apply.
Juxtapose that with what we call civilization. On the one hand, a forest is a collection of beings so willing to give and receive truth from one another that they become one thing. A Douglas Fir cannot fool an Aspen that it is something else. The Aspen does not pretend to be a Maple. The Oak has leaves that sample and absorb the off-gassed, chemical condensates of its neighbors, and shares with them in turn. Every tree in the wood shares carbon with every other tree underground through the mycelia of their root structures, assisted by fungi, the most un-heralded, unseen, world-class mediators and facilitators of the planet. The network of sharing is so complete, so entwined, that the forest becomes an organism in its own right. Trees have nothing to gain from pretentious self-centeredness. They have everything to gain from being exactly what they are.
This collection of varieties alone proves the social superiority of trees to humans. There is no murder, no isms, no inequality…makes ya think. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
The veneer of civilization and culture is sophisticated fabrication
By contrast, human civilization is hardly anything but lies. Lies that appear in facebook posts, instagram stories, and snaps. Tweeted lies. Spoken lies. Documented lies. How rare to find someone not trying to be more than they are, or not trying to be someone else – or wishing they were. We drive cars we can’t afford to pretend we have more money. We mortgage our lives to dwell in houses that are shoddily and hastily built; they have no architectural finesse, or aesthetic beauty, or soul whatsoever. They do fit neatly on the 3rd of an acre lot sandwiched between two neighbors you smile and wave at, but whose names you do not know. But for God’s sake can they just please keep their lawn mowed?
No, human culture is a polished veneer of appearances. Its strength is not deep connection, but deep deception. You are more deeply committed to your favorite celebrity (who you will never meet) than to your neighbor. We cannot share life the way trees do because we cannot be trusted to share equally. I wish I had the talent to paint in words the absurdity of the tree-equivalent of Elon Musk, or Marc Zuckerburg, or any one of the despicable Kardashians.
This? This is the height of human civilization? Please! Give me a forest! (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
Here’s a thought: If you picture the canopy of trees in a forest having an average height that represents their individual net worth, the average height would be 88* feet tall. The Elon Musk tree would tower 23,525,920** feet above the average height of the forest. That’s a large number. Correction. It’s an obscene number. It is twenty-three million, five-hundred twenty-five thousand, nine-hundred twenty-three feet above the eighty-eight foot ceiling of the forest average. In other words 800 Mt. Everests stacked on one another, or 800 times higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial jet.
See anything sticking 23 million feet above this? No? Didn’t think so. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
That Elon tree aberration is 4455.66 miles above the average tree. That’s a mutation! (That is farther than the distance from New York, New York to Anchorage, Alaska). The Bezos, Zuckerburg, and Buffett trees would also tower way above the ”average height” canopy. Can you even imagine what that would look like from space?
[This deserves a WaitButWhy illustration from Tim Urban. Like the ones in this excellent piece on AI. (C’mon Tim, discover trees!)]
Trees aren’t greedy – They’re more honorable than people
No tree would be so ashamedly greedy. Humans have no such limitations on either shame or greed. Trees are way more honorable than people. Trees exist to scrub poison out of the atmosphere, turn it into biomass and energy, and give it back in the form of life to everything else on the planet. The immorally rich exist to squeeze life out of everyone ”beneath” them, use them for their own ends, and excrete the poison of selfishness with its envy, lust, and competition, all while being loved and praised and enamored for doing so. Talk about insanity writ large…
You will live your entire life and maybe know one or at most two other people. I mean really know them. But you will be coldly calculating to make sure you get as much as you give in every transaction with everyone else. You will cultivate a persona for work, for your kids, for your spouse. Then you will put on a face for the public at large. You will go to church and put on a religious face for the members, and for God. While there, you will have the uneasy feeling that God sees through your piety. He sees beneath the veneer. The degree to which you allow Him to see, will be the degree to which you experience the unfathomable bliss of love undeserved.
A classroom for a better way
Go to the woods. The trees will release pheromones to bribe you into carrying pollen for them, or maybe just to get you to stand nearby and breathe for a while. But go there and tell them your stories, and show them your curated life with its glamorous photos of the vacation that will take you ten times longer to pay for than the time you spent enjoying it. Show them your checkbook register, or your stock portfolio.
I’m just here to learn. I have a feeling there’s so much you can teach me. I hope I’m not too late; for your kind, or for mine. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
Go to the woods and look. See if you can spot a tree trying to seduce its neighbor. See if you find one trying to impress. Find one that is hustling its neighbor, or conning it. Especially, look for the trees trying to oppress and exploit and abuse and use their surrounding, neighbor trees. You know, the ”hard-working” trees just trying to climb the ladder and get ahead.
You won’t find any. No, they just stand still, wave in the breeze, reach and stretch, and branch, and take in what’s there, and give back to everything around them, and practice being invisible.
The Takeaway: I learned these truths by reading fiction
You cannot lie to a tree. But you can lie to yourself and to others. You can tell yourself there’s nothing to learn here. Trees aren’t people, you say. No, thank God, they’re not. I learned all these things about trees, their essential truths, their fundamental importance, and the dire emergency they truly face, by reading a work of fiction. That’s the power that fiction has to reveal truth and change lives!
NOTE:
*The dataset for tree heights found the average height was 87.6 feet (88′).
** Elon Musk’s net worth is approx. $185B, the average American net worth is the whopping, $692K (which seems very high). 185B/692K=267,341 (this is how many times more Musk’s net worth is than the avg. If $692K = 88’, then $185B = 88 x 267,341 = 23,526,008’ (the height of the Musk tree) 23,526,008 – 88 = 23,525,920’ (The height in feet of Musk’s tree above the canopy average height)
I copied the list into Evernote, reformatted it to add a checkbox, and went through to see how many I’ve read. So far, I’ve read twenty-eight of Peterson’s recommended books. His is weighted heavily to volumes by Freud and Jung. Understandably, since he spent years as a clinical psychologist. I’ve never read entire books by either psychoanalyst, but I’m familiar with their work and ideas. I will read their books. I’ll read the remaining seventy-two on the list over the next several years, God willing. Peterson said, there’s a whole education in there. So true.
A couple of his titles are by Dostoevsky and Hemingway. Two of my favorites, though they couldn’t be more different stylistically. Their works are on my list, too. With an extra two Hemingway’s that Peterson didn’t include on his.
In looking at my incomplete list, standing now at some 40 titles that off the top of my head I deem to have had the most impact on my life, I’m struck by how many are works of fiction. There are two non-fiction works that have wrought change in my systems of thinking and emotional awareness, but the bulk of the really life-altering books I’ve read are works of fiction.
Great writers can capture truth and the essence of life or some aspect of existence so wonderfully, that it grafts into the reader. Some character, or some scene can make you see the world in an entirely new, more complete way. And that’s good.
I have a heartache already that I will not be able to read all of the truly great books I wish to read, but I’m gonna go for it for sure. What’s on your own list?
Ancient Groves Nature Trail though old growth forest in the Sol Duc section of Olympic National Park in Washington, United States – This is what Foresters refer to as “The Understory”
I love to read. It is the single greatest skill a human can acquire in my opinion. The books I’ve read have transformed my life, and continue to do so. There is something magic about the transposition of knowledge, sensation, emotion, and longing that happens when a skillful author communicates via a form of ancient, abstract telepathy to the reader.
Some books are better than others. Some tackle subject matter more weighty than others. Some achieve both. The one I’m reading now is on that list.
I’m only one-third of the way through it and it’s already blown my mind. It actually blew my mind in the first couple of pages by a cosmic connection I’d felt relating to something I’d jotted in my notes as I stared out my picture window at the pairs of willow oaks budding up the perpendicular street centered in my view.
I wrote this snippet:
”Has anyone ever successfully captured the perfect architecture inherent in the design of a tree?”
I was thinking of the perfect marvel of engineered branching and load bearing and surface area distribution and how no human architect has ever attempted building anything like a tree.
Imagine my profound surprise and delight to begin listening to the audible version of The Overstory, by Richard Powers. winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an incredible story about trees, and how they have impacted and enriched and enthralled and empowered the characters lives. Some of them also received tree messages, so…kinda makes ya think.
Some of these magnificent spires have been here since the birth of Jesus. Imagine. A thing so ubiquitous as to have become almost invisible. And yet, a thing that we share 25% of our own DNA with, and owe 100% of our lives to. And things without which, there is no anything. No, really.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that humans, though apparently created last, and ostensibly for the purpose of taking care of our orb-shaped space ride on the outer edge of the Milky Way, may in fact have devolved into one of the least intelligent life forms still alive and kicking on our cosmic home.
Trees appear to be smarter. They certainly live longer, cooperate better, are more social, and are more committed to sharing their resources to insure their thriving survival together. Maybe we have a still have a slim chance to change that and we can learn enough to move out of the stupidity basement.
I’ll write more about this amazing book, I’m sure, but I want to heartily recommend it. You will thank me, and trees, if you do choose to read it.
