Mr. Nobody is a 2009 movie staring Jared Leto as a 118 year old man, the last “mortal” man during his final hours before dying. As this ancient man is famous, a renegade journalist tries to interview him about his life and we, the audience, then see his central narrative break and branch into several different directions. The narratives overlap and rhyme from time to time but we see how many directions his life could have taken (and did take in the multiverse). I’m not doing a good job describing it, but I recommend all see it.
I lead with this movie description because it shows something that I experience every day—and likely you do as well: our lives as trees.
Lets start with what trees are: there are trunks, branches, roots, leaves and then there are parts of a tree that technically aren’t part of the tree but they are vital to the tree: soil, water, light and that wild and wooly mycelial network of fungus that distributes nutrients and electric information underground. All that, in this metaphor, is the tree.
Our life story is a tree.
It might seem like a straight line from birth to death, but it doesn’t take us long to recognize the twists and turns in our stories that initially seem to be irrelevant but then quite suddenly become central to our identity or life mission or connect us to important people in our life.
Hitchhiker in Santa Barbara said he was the production manager for “Slacker” in Austin. I checked it out and then met my first wife.
Flight delayed in Denver forced me to stay in the airport an extra 10 hours. While I waited, I considered an email from Rick wondering if I ever spoke at events. The ensuing conversation leads me to write on Substack.
These seem like they are straightforward and linnear, but only when we look back and trace the path. The twists and turns make sense now, but at the time certain events seem random and distracting.
But then we can play the game of “What if I didn’t pick up the hitchhiker?” or “What if the flight left on time?” Where would my life be now if one single decision was different?
Obviously it would be different, right?
We tell ourselves that we will never know, that this is not how our life went. Our choices led us to this moment in our life and we can’t possibly know how things would have turned out otherwise. Except we can know. We can know how things turned out. We can see all the options. We just don’t take it seriously.
We can know all the possibilities of our life by using our imagination. We can imagine what would have happened and see how it all played out.
Many of you shrug at this, shake your head, and dismiss this as fancy and nothing more. But if you have read any of my work and understand what I consider to be real, then you know that our imagination and fancy is very real indeed. Our imagination has consequences and information and it even changes the course of our life. We have a dream that feels prophetic and consciously heed its warning. We imagine a terrible outcome of an event and use that imagination to validate our choice not to do it. We imagine an attractive person being interested in us and that imagination gives us courage to approach. Imagination is powerful and influential, and we listen to it every day.
I do not think it is silly or inaccurate, then, to suggest that each of our imaginations are separate branches on our story tree.
We have our trunk—this is the solid, immovable center that holds our physical characteristics over time, our birth date, our developmental benchmarks and big events like adoption date or marriage. These are the part of our story that seem easiest to identify and most difficult to refute or dismiss as fancy.
Then there are the branches.
Each branch is a line of narrative that continues up and out. This is the time when we rode our bicycle cross-country and felt immense freedom and sense of possibility. This branch of our story is highly susceptible to the influence of our imagination and re-storying. Did we feel freedom? Didn’t we also felt stretches of fear and doubt? Why isn’t that part of the story being repeated and validated? Why is the sense of possibility getting all the press, even though most of the time you were just hungry and uncomfortable.
But it is still a branch, regardless if it is accurate or not. Regardless if it matches other people’s descriptions. Regardless if you actually dreamed the whole thing up. It is now a part of your story and therefore a part of your tree.
The same goes for roots.
Roots get wrapped up in other roots. They get intimately connected via the mycelium fungal network and underground it is hard to tell our stories apart.
“Did I throw up during assembly in third grade or was that you?”
“I stood up and gave a toast but my Italian was accidentally offensive.” “No, I gave that toast.” “No, I can remember it clearly”
This happens all the time because our stories are all composted together underground. Images and feelings get distributed willy nilly and of course we get them mixed up. And this might actually be nature’s plan. That is probably on purpose. As it is with trees, the entangled root system keeps us all connected and interdependent. Trees need other trees.
This is my point: Our stories are not just ours and they aren’t organized in a line. Our stories spread out. They spread in different directions and they include things that we made up entirely and now believe are true.
They also dig into the earth with other people’s stories and we share narratives like minerals and water. We exchange them so elegantly that it is impossible to know whose story is whose. We are, in a sense, each other.
Above ground our stories seem like our own. Our story is biographical and our story is completely imaginary.
Below ground our stories are each others, borrowing this image and this feeling and offering others our freely.
This is lovely David. I like the idea that we are elegantly entangled in stories, all of which are perfectly inaccurate and do not stop or begin at the borders of what we take to be ourselves. I appreciate the leadership you demonstrate by consistently suggesting we use the study of story to trace the movement of spirit, and how you consistently acknowledge the inner cognitive resistance we're likely to experience when attempting to embrace non-linear perspectives. It strikes me that the linear and non-linear, our unity and individuality, are designed to work together. The roots of a tree system apparently reflect the approximate span of the canopy. As above, so below. If we want to embrace the dissolution of a solid identity and claim our connectedness, we also need an equally strong and stable sense of individual self. We have to grow in both directions; becoming a middle-world, responsible and functional individual with healthy boundaries and personal agency as the necessary foundation for letting go and merging—energetically—with all of humanity and the rest of existence. It seems easier to fall into one camp or the other than it is to do both at the same time, but embracing both disciplines is what allows the highest expression of both the spiritual and temporal.