Celebration of Time

Up on Mount Lemmon, near Tucson, in the visitors' center there is a 300-pound cross-section slab of a Douglas Fir, some six feet in diameter. It still makes a statement. “Sir, I exist!” Each ring says, “I’m alive!” Solid yellow, full of substance and history, the slab has personality, gusto and permanence flowing from it. This tree was 700 years old when it was cut down. We can tell that by counting all the growth rings. The ring for 1492 is highlighted-a big date for us in the so-called civilized world; it was just a tiny blip in the immense history of that tree. Some rings are thick, others are so thin that only an expert can count them. Good years, bad years. The growth rings show a total of 700 trees within that one tree: 700 rings, 700 years, 700 dimensions of time.
We are like a tree with growth rings. Our brain records every sensory experience, every thought or stimulation of the imagination. Our growth rings are in our memory. When certain electrodes are attached to our skull, vivid memories, emotions, even smells, of our childhood are immediately called to mind. Imagine that each ring in our memory fills up with fifty-two more chapters of sensations. Multiply those 52 chapters—one year—by how many years old you are. That's how many rings of you there are. You might have twenty good rings and only one bad ring. Or maybe it's ten good and ten bad rings. Still, it's half good! We cannot get stuck in one ring, live in the past, and suspend our growth. We cannot get stuck in a behavior that keeps us from creating a new ring of growth, flowing forward down Time's river.