Get Up That Tree. Now!
A lion chased me up a tree and from there my view was improved greatly
I first encountered this proverb on an Outward Bound course in college. African, we were told, though who really knows these things. I just found out that Gandhi probably never said “Be the change you wish to see in the world” either, which still doesn’t alter the inherent wisdom. I’ll go with the African origin, until advised otherwise. It was used as a context for making sense out of the discomfort we were going to experience in this wilderness stress course. Clearly we were being introduced to the idea that the difficulties would make us bigger in the long run and give us a larger point of view.
I then forgot about it until 2004 when I almost died and spent three weeks in the hospital. The proverb actually surfaced again, unbidden, and I was thinking about how the lion in my case was a microscopic bacterium and how it chased me up its own version of a tree. From there I could see more clearly.
Then it was useful again in 2011, when my youngest son almost died, in a very similar way, and I told him the proverb and it meant a lot to him and helped him to make sense of everything that happened. We’ve often invoked it between us in the years since then.
So it’s an extremely useful idea — no matter what our particular lion is. It can give us some sense of where we might be at the end of something that, at first, seems only horrifically bad. I’ve often thought that my near-death experience didn’t make me braver in any way I could discern. It didn’t help me make hard phone calls because I was so grateful to be alive. It didn’t ultimately make me more grateful every day of my life. I had to take it as an article of faith, and I still do, that somehow the experience made me stronger and improved my view as the proverb says.
I’m incredibly grateful my son didn’t die and I have had many other experiences, as I’m sure you have. I went through my own nasty divorce. I have been fired from jobs and I could go through the whole list. I lost my father when I was five and I have to assume that I can see further because that lion chased me up the tree of my dad’s death. I don’t feel anything about it every day, kind of like how fish don’t see the water they’re in. But I have to assume I’d be a different man than the man I am if my father had lived. I don’t know who that man would be. I do know that if I hadn’t gotten divorced I would not have the amazing wife I have now, in a marriage that’s lasted longer than my first one.
There are lots of moments in life where shit happens and we have to reach into the muck and pull out the gold. There’s also dumb daily stuff like waiting in lines. There’s traffic jams and there’s seeing artificial Christmas trees already in early October on display inside Home Depot. There’s gas explosions and no heat as the weather gets cold, like here in the Merrimack Valley. There’s autocorrect on your cell phone that alters messages right as you press send. There’s cancer diagnoses and sudden heart attacks. You don’t have to look far to find some lemon that you need turned into lemonade.
Here’s the apparent good news we’ve been learning. You don’t have to feel happy about any of it. All you have to do is be willing to ask, at any point, where’s the gold. How is my view improved? You don’t even have to mean it. All you have to do is get your ass up that tree.
