> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://growing-smaller.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Planting Trees - URL: https://growing-smaller.ghost.io/planting-trees/ - Published: 2026-08-16T12:30:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-24T09:52:16.000Z - Author: Pachomios Browne is the best way to live a life that is whole, where the person I want to be or believe that I truly am is the person I live as and toward. What is that saying about how if you want to have (fruit) trees? – something about the best time to plant being twenty years ago and the second best time being now? Something like that. I just can't get away from a problem, though. I know that saying to be full of wisdom, but then I say in one form or another, "But I haven't planted the tress, so I have to go to the store to buy apples for now, and I will plant a tree tomorrow." Worse still, perhaps, is the fact that, even when I do plant trees and I really do need to buy apples in the interim, trees take management – pruning, monitoring for invasions, maybe fertilizer – and even when I am pretty good at tree management, by the time some critical phase for establishment, development, or fruiting is reached – *I mean c'mon I've already built my apple-buying pattern why change things now amIright*? Or, ain't nobody got time for that!\* In the rocky interim while I am buying apples and working toward my tree bearing fruit, there exist several critical periods in which I must remain vigilantly active.[^](https://app.notion.com/p/Growing-Trees-3b669de1120f808ab8c9e874788aa266?source=copy%5Flink) ‡That or I can simply choose to live life without apples. --- I can't get away from this problem. I just saw it on a billboard on the highway. But first, status quo solutions. An improvement to modern medicine would work like this: The doctor discerns, through tests and whatever else, that the cause of your high blood pressure is \_% genetic and \_% lifestyle. They give you a program for starting a medication, which you will be able to taper down in time, but perhaps our modern understanding of the body suggests that you will take some dose of this medication for the remainder of your life. The rest of the intervention teaches, guides, and supports the patient in improving their lifestyle. Remove the need for medication as much as possible down to \_%, the rest of the program getting you down to your optimal and new normal.\*\* ‡‡I believe that that is, in fact, what they *want* to do or are taught to do or know that they should do. Some of them *do* take this route, in part, telling you to quit inhaling un-relaxers, maybe asking about your methods of acceptance, telling you to take your streaming-service ass on some walks. What about support as part of the supported medical program, though? That would be awesome! A support group? – can you imagine? *Would we go, though?* Some of them, however, really *are* quick to say, "Oh yeah we have a pill for that." Even, "And if *that* pill causes some issues, we have a pill for that, too. We can get you set up with a prescription cascade regimen of problem 1 ↓ pill 1 ↓ side effect 1 → problem 2 ↓ pill 2 ↓ side effect 2 → problem 3 ↓ pill 3 ↓ *w!e'LL gEt tO the boTToM oF th!s."* Maybe it's that they think we won't really try. It does feel awfully good to get high on some kind of smoke, high on a high ball, high on double cheesecake, high on whatever amIright? Or maybe they don't think about our level of try and they know that the infrastructure just isn't there – the coaches and support groups and prayers. They could also just be too busy and ain't nobody got time for that. But hither or thither, tick or tock, we have this situation: It is easier to use the pill and gtf on with both of our lives because there is a lot of life to live and we can just pay next Tuesday for a hamburger today. We can say that all they do is throw drugs at us. It is apparent that, across all people who talk about such things as our use of medications and the role of doctors in the paths we take, there indeed exists a structure of quick-fixing with drugs. I know two other things, though – 1\. Talk about the pharmaco-medical complex is guaranteed to be composed of a cocktail of criticisms, and the prevalence of stories about prescribers and prescribees is bound to resemble all environments of voluntary feedback. Discussing problems is more natural and likely than energetically, intensively scrutinizing *just how they got it so RIGHT!*, and 2\. We beg for drugs. We love us a quick fix because *ain't nobody*. I have no one to really blame but myself. --- I began to realize that my job training others was basically futile. I had my ideals – my grand ideas – about what I could do in the lives of those learners in terms of helping them to become better thinkers and to not be easily manipulated. But to think that I, in some room, essentially doing magic tricks, could compete with the rest of their world, especially social media and each other, was to have a line of site on the folded, weathered corner of the picture only. (And not social media per se, but rather the imagistic relationships that are formed there between people that are forever strangers.) To think that I could compete with the world in the formation of people who had already grown up in homes with cultures was a winning attitude with a losing future. A guide is as effective as the guidability of the guided. They are one possible influence among many, whose colors may be green or red of varying tints and shades, and in reality probably a light made of some admixture of green and red of many varying tints and shades. Check plus, check, check minus, minus any guides at all, though, what is our state of nature like? More *Lord of the Flies* or more *The Coral Island*? Hobbes or Rousseau? More *The Martian* or more *Apollo 13*? --- So, the billboard I just passed, which makes perfectly good sense, but is surely a waste of time and money, or has been a waste of time and now only a waste of money being held up there by optimism or perhaps by a pledge to take certain actions in order to comply with certain requirements... The billboard showed a man rehabilitating in a hospital bed and it said "He saved three minutes..." I have to guess at the second half because in order to read it, I would have had to put myself and others in danger. But my guess is that maybe just a picture of him with his leg up in traction was the second half of that sentence. Or perhaps there were words below. As I came from behind the huge semi I had been slowly passing, I saw the man with his leg wrapped and with a look on his face which honestly did not look miserable enough. But the quick flash in my head was that it was an advertisement for some hospital. And then I saw those words, *He saved three minutes*. As it passed out of my sight very quickly, I imagined the rest of a sentence I figured would have been there, something like, "And now he has six months to recover," or, "He ended someone’s life forever."\*\*\* ‡‡‡OMINOUS. And without being a cynical and negative brat, I simply wondered whose driving behavior that sign was going to change. Surely those who take it most to heart are already driving the speed limit, or maybe just barely above, and perhaps it will inspire them to drop it down two or three miles per hour. Perhaps it will help someone who feels very guilty about the very rare and occasional texting they do while driving and make them say, "Yeah, what am I thinking? I’ll never do this again." So, hmmm...maybe the billboard is a little worthwhile. Because there is always the possibility that someone who is an otherwise very good driver compared to most others on the road, a very conscientious driver – there’s always a possibility that they will be the one who causes the accident. And at 70 or 75 or 80 miles per hour, it really doesn’t take much even for a little sedan to misbehave and to cause a crash that changes many lives forever. And in thinking of those calculations of possibility, the chance that it, that billboard might do some good may make it worth it. (Although by that reasoning, we should have instructions to better living plastered all around us everywhere we go at all times. Insurance is a gamble and a b-word.) Of course, we know that the driver who is most likely to change lives forever is the one driving 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 miles per hour above. The one who texts all the time, watches videos on the highway while eating breakfast and talking to a friend who is in their ear. The one who drives drunk or high. The one who, when they are angry because of something happening in their own world, has no care or concern for any of the multitude of worlds around them and who believes that they are perfectly justified in tailgating that family ahead of them as they rage down the fast lane in their gigantic truck. Or the one who is stupid enough who thinks that since they have four-wheel drive, it makes no difference whatsoever how they drive around others in the rain and snow and ice. If any of these people or many more of various sorts even happens to see that billboard, I don’t think they are going to change their behavior. Much less do I think that they will operate in the genuine control center of their selves any differently. That takes actual formation. Reformation. When I drank, I told so many lies to enable my habit to survive. So many lies that it became impossible to remember them all. And I knew quite a long time before I ever stopped drinking, by the way. I knew that it was a much easier thing, though not easy at all, to change who I was or to let who I was be changed and become someone who did not lie or lied in very rare occasions and circumstances. It’s much easier to just not lie than it is to remember all the lies. If you don’t lie, there are no lies to remember. But changing a person takes a whole lot of time. A lie is a quick fix. True, it’s a quick fix that may last a long time, sometimes forever. (To those with the admirable hope that a lie can never last forever, well, maybe not before the eyes of God, but in that sense, the lie never lasted at all. Unless there is some way to prove that there has never been a lie in history which we have never found out, can't my badly-lived drive live forever? If this seems like a dirty trick, that's because it is, at least, a trick. It is an unfalsifiable claim. I find it much more believable and consistent with lived experience to think of someone who colluded in a business deal and then the world changed and we all moved on from there. *That's just how the market works, chap*. I find it much more believable and consistent with lived experience that there are realities in which we all live and nobody anywhere ever can explain why this or that particular thing is this or that particular way. *This is the manner in which to treat this particular unknown.* That's unfalsifiable, too. I just find it more believable. At any rate, it's probably a moot point here... Apples –) Changing the driver is going to take a re-formation. I mean, if the addict who formerly used has character defects to work on changing and letting be changed so as to live differently, so, too, the *every*body. Addiction makes you unique in some ways, but not in the ways of being tangled and marred and destructive in the world. In the gravity of the effects of those defects? Probably. In having defects? No way. Let's not limit ourselves to thinking of drinking or drugging or driving (*It isn't us, Pachomios; you're saying it.*). The way we interact with our children and our neighbors and our siblings and our co-workers contain countless opportunities for us to engage in bad behavior, and we do. Without exception, we do. You do. And getting better at those things takes formation or reformation. Frederick Douglass said it is easier to raise healthy children than it is to repair broken men, something like that. That’s for all people. It is easier to raise healthy people than it is to fix broken people. (Which is an assertion I’m not positive is true, because it is not at all easy to raise kids, and we do not raise kids alone. In the same way that you drive next to those dangerous and deadly drivers, you are a child. Your driver’s education instructor may have been like a parent to you as far as your driving formation, but you are still moving in a world of strangers who have no knowledge of you or care for you at all. Raising kids, as challenging as it is all by itself anyway, includes sending them out onto the \[oh no help me avoid writing <>\]. Sending them out into many overlapping worlds in which careless drivers abound. How will you protect them there? This is all part of you raising them, isn’t it? \[My youngest child has been road ready for a few months and has 50 hours or so in. And even after he completes all of his driver’s training and can drive independently, he will still be in training, and he will still be a minor, and he will still be my child. I will still be advising him on driving in rain and ice and snow, driving around aggressive or distracted drivers. I will still be raising him then.\] And I’m not so certain that all of that is easier than taking a broken driver and reforming them.) [+](https://app.notion.com/p/Fear-3bf69de1120f80ecadf5e3d409d4ff31?source=copy%5Flink) --- Planting trees, as easy as that part is, is followed by a very long wait for fruit. I honor and respect as much as I can, not knowing who it is – the person or people behind that billboard – but it is probably a waste of time and resources. This same thing happens in governments. There are real potential fixes to real plaguing problems. And after thousands of man hours from thousands of men and women – tens of thousands – HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS – we arrive at a medication which may or may not help, and even if so, probably just in the moment, and almost certainly with certain side effects. When what we really need is to improve lifestyle for \_% of the solution – \_% of the solution to our resentment, our fear, our lateness, our high blood pressure, our lust, our greed, our big-truck social media self-absorption and our hatred and envy and pride – and that takes planting trees. That's how we become better drivers. We will either have time for that, or the rest of the world will pay for our unwillingness to live differently. As it is, I think, perhaps, that the question is really *how much?*. *How much* will we make others pay for our unwillingness to change for the good. My heart sinks into my stomach looking over the edge into the darkest pit. I think, perhaps, that we do not ever live a single day without leaving the trail strewn with sticks – ruts – piles – stones. Impotently shooting seed into useless spaces. God, save us from these bodies of death. Make us gardens, rich with seed-bearing fruit. \*If I choose, instead, to not be lazy in how I say it, then I would say that, overcoming the established pattern might be a harder hill to climb than building the habit in the first place. I have heard builders say that it is easier to build new than to renovate, which, having no building experience, I can still very much see why that would be. The real sticky trick, though, is the fact that sometimes you actually *do* have to resort to buying apples for a time – you really *do* have to build a temporary habit in some vital interim. That little hill grows due to circumstantial tectonics beyond your control. But what if I get up to the top of that now-mountain and ask about just how necessary apples are in my diet?‡ \*\*You might be thinking, "Yeah but they do that." I know. Well, sort of. I only sort of know that because they only sort of do that. Go back up there, though, because I was hoping you'd read the rest of that idea.‡‡ \*\*\*I saw it on the way back up north. It finished, "...He lost so much more."‡‡‡