Noticing The Trees
There is a line in Michelle Obama’s recent memoir, Becoming, that hasn’t let me go since I read it.
It’s nothing profound. But it’s keenly observant.
It’s an observation that doesn’t have anything to do with the subject at hand, but in reality it’s the compilation of many more small observations like this one that develop her whole purpose in life.
Her observation is tucked away in her recounting of Saturday mornings with her Father. Every weekend Michelle and her father would hop in the car and zip around Chicago visiting family. Didn’t matter if they were distant, immediate, or extended. If they had the family blood in them, they would be driving over to see them on the weekends.
And this is where this simple but observant line comes from:
“My father’s family, meanwhile, sprawled across Chicago’s broader South Side and included an array of great-aunts and third cousins, plus a few stray outliers whose blood connection remained cloudy. We orbited between all of them. I quietly assessed where we were going by the number of trees I’d see on the street outside. The poorer neighborhoods often had no trees at all. But to my dad, everyone was kin.”1
I haven’t been able to let go of the tree comment since I laid my eyes on those words. First, it’s an extremely observant insight from childhood that still sticks out to her years later. But secondly, it’s a disturbing detail of how the land describes the social conditions for those who live on it. Trees are life. Protection. Generational covering. And in neighborhoods with less resources, it’s not only reflected in the social conditions but in the physical conditions as well.
In essence, sometimes the physical conditions describe the social conditions. Since reading this line, I can’t not see it as I drive through different parts of my own city. Her description is one that stays inside my head. What I’ve learned by walking around with this social reality is that what (or who) is physically outside of us can influence our internal landscape.
Now, here is the less artistic way of describing the point I’m trying to make…
How We “Get It” When We Don’t Get It…
Have you ever been in a conversation where you just couldn’t understand where the other person is coming from?
It’s not that you didn’t understand the words coming out of their mouth but you couldn’t understand the motivations and emotions that are motivating how they are speaking about the world? Maybe it was a conversation about politics or policy. Maybe it was a recent controversy. Maybe it was a current social justice movement.
You truly listened to what someone had to say but you just couldn’t relate to it. It’s not that you were being combative. You were being honest. You couldn’t understand where they were coming from. You couldn’t understand how their perspective could be so different from yours. We’ve all been there at one point, but it’s hard to know how to know if we’re not getting something that we truly need to get.
Maybe an easier way to say it is how do we get it when we don’t initially get something?
The answer is finding a new landscape.
Often, we need a change of surroundings to change our minds.
One of the reasons people reject difficult conversations, movements of justice, or reform of policies that would help all those around us flourish is because of our mental landscapes that are influenced by our physical landscapes around us.2 We tend to reject important conversations and movements because we do not have experience or interactions with those who are being hurt by what many of us call “normal.”
In other words, we need a different line of sight.
Many of the aches of our world are out of mind because they are out of sight. Many of us take the trees for granted. Many of us aren’t counting the trees. Shoot, we’re so used to the forest we don’t even notice any of the trees (I believe I’ve stretched this metaphor as far as it can go at this point).
The hard work, the work that helps us “get it” when we “don’t get it,” is changing up our surroundings. To gain a new line of sight. We all inherit a certain type of physical surroundings through the neighborhood (or lack of) we grew up in, the schools we went to, and the places we visited. All of these settings over time become our line of sight.
6 Simple Ways To Diversity Your Social Circles
If we want to make sure our minds can be changed when needed, it first begins with changing our physical and social landscapes which is much easier and less intimidating than we think. Here are five extremely simple ways to diversify your physical and social landscape3 (I’ve included two for introverts and four for extroverts):
1. Go Read A Different Author. Reading is dialoguing. Taking in the words of someone different than you expands your mental landscape to empathize with experiences you wouldn’t organically encounter. It also enables you to have diverse conversations over a diverse amount of topics.
2. Go Follow Someone: If you know me, I didn’t want to put this one in here because I believe technology is destroying us just as fast as it’s helping us right now (thank you Tik Tok). But one of the most helpful elements of the internet is how it makes knowledge accessible to everyone. It eliminates traditional obstacles in accessing knowledge (keeping in mind it also doesn’t filter or test information as well).4 At it’s best, following someone online who lives in a different physical and social landscape as you reveals how other people’s world’s may be different than your own.
3. Go To A Recreation Center: Consider hanging out or working out in a local community center. Private gyms and facilities only provide access to those who have the same sort of means you have in your own life. It’s a similarity (and priority) you share. If you want to rub shoulders with people different from you, go workout beside people in a different way.
4. Go Sign Up For A Public Sport: If you have kids, this is an easy way to rub shoulders with others who may not be in your school district or immediate area. It gives a chance for kids and adults alike to come into contact with one another around something they love to do in common.
5. Go Get A Haircut: Consider going and getting your haircut at a local barber in town. I will never forget how convicted I felt when Jamar Tisby wrote about how if as a white person you want to begin to understand the extra weight of walking around as a black man in the world, go to a barbor of a difference race wrestle with the predicament of wondering if the barber knows what to do with your hair. Barber shops and salons are great ways to intersect with all different types of people and conversations.
6. Go To Church: Yes, I went there. If it’s a healthy congregation, you should be running into people from all different stages and phases of life with diverse experiences. One of the bravest things you can do in your week is join a worship service where you’re brought into contact with people who you might never run into other than having a central purpose of worshipping God.
My guess is if you explore any of these six options, you will find a different physical landscape that might just influence your mental landscape. It’s through bumping into different people that opens the door to bumping into different ideas and experiences you may never otherwise.
In other words, through the words of Michelle Obama, changing up where you work, live, and play may help you begin to notice the trees, or lack of trees, around you.
References
1Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018), 36.
2Richard Beck, Stranger God (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2017), 142.
3Jamar Tisby’s work in How To Fight Racism is an inspiration for this list.
4Brett McCracken’s work in The Wisdom Pyramid has been helpful in understanding how the internet is a double sided coin for all of us.