Emo birthday thoughts about a tree
For my birthday this year I gave myself the gift of time and undivided attention. One of the great things about running is that you can’t start scrolling through Instagram when you feel bored, unless your intention is to put yourself out of your misery by getting concussed by a tree. Anyhow, I rose early on the morning of my big day to go for a longish run, wanting to take my mind off work and ease back into the swing of half-marathon training after a week of holiday in Japan. But where I was expecting to celebrate a return to the familiar, I found loss and mourning instead.
A few hundred metres from the gravelly junction where the path around Holland Plain connects to the Rail Corridor, there used to stand a single tall tree, rising out of the tangle of impenetrable shrubbery to fan its branches across the sky. It’s impossible to miss, and from the moment I spotted it, eons ago when the Rail Corridor was little more than a muddy gap between untamed bushes, I knew I was in love.
With that love came anxiety, so closely are those two emotions intertwined. Year after year I would feel a small jolt of apprehension each time I passed by the junction, half-expecting my proud, lonely tree to be gone, charred into a stump by some mischievous bolt of lightning looking for a conduit between heaven and earth. Year after year it stayed put, rooting itself ever more deeply and defiantly in the life-giving soil. Through rain and shine, through fog and wind, through hordes of adventure-starved Singaporeans trampling by in search of Clementi Forest. Whether at the break of day or the fall of dusk, my favourite tree was always there to greet me.
Until one day it wasn’t.
That day, for me, happened to be my 29th birthday.
As I ran towards the clearing my eyes were already scanning for its haughty silhouette, the distinctive fork in its branches, feathered by a sparse crown of leaves. But all I saw was a desolate expanse of sky.
I don’t know what happened to the tree. Perhaps it met its end through natural causes, as I had always feared. Or perhaps it was deemed a safety risk and felled by humans. And I know it was never actually my tree. It was its own living, breathing master, right until the very end.
But I still felt like I had lost a dear friend.
I write this blog for myself, yet I still struggle to express my feelings in words. There are so many shades of feelings, more than the number of red-orange-purple-gold-pink hues in a glorious summer sunset. I suppose words have their nuances too. For example, the word “melancholy” itself sounds like a bit of poetry as you roll it around your mouth, savouring its richness of meaning. “Wistful”, meanwhile, practically begs to be said with a sigh, a soft expulsion of air that hisses off the tip of your tongue on the first syllable.
Today I felt a bit disconsolate as I realised that I had been searching for something in the wrong place all along and that it was time to let go. Knowing when to give up is as important as knowing when to try hard, after all. A wise man once told me that while many things are worth fighting for, not everything that you are fighting for may be worth it. Not everything needs to be a battle. Not everything should be.
That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, knowing that all the effort I put in came to naught in the end. But I believe — and I know this sounds incredibly smug, but I don’t mean it to be — that trying to be a better person is never a waste, not really. Even though I know I’ve tried and failed spectacularly countless times. Even though — or especially because — I’ve had to try harder than most, if only because I’ve been a worse person that most.
In a world that emphasises knowledge and outcomes and efficiency, I think love and kindness and gratitude are severely underrated virtues, ones that I wish I had valued more in my youth. Even if that love is towards a now-dead tree that once watched over you from afar (and probably quite judgmentally, too, if I’m being honest. It always did seem like a very opinionated tree).
After that run I decided to give myself another birthday gift. One of acceptance. That some things just don’t go the way you want. That you have to let go of your favourite tree someday, even when you don’t feel ready for it. That you can get hurt or disappointed, and still find the courage to love and laugh again.
Hope is the delicate green shoot that springs from the decay on the forest floor, that dreams of bursting through the canopy above, and unfurling its leaves to touch the bright blue sky.
