What Made Those Marks on the Tree Trunk?
Often our perceptions result from mistaken assumptions or projections
Looking out my window, I noticed some unusual marks on the trunk of a tree in our neighbors’ yard. Although they were jagged, they were also regularly curved, as if someone had carefully used a marker to draw arcs on the bark of the tree. “Strange,” I thought. “The children and raccoons in our neighborhood aren’t likely so well-equipped, capable, or motivated to have made those marks, and why would an adult make them?”
Next I noticed that the marks sometimes moved slightly, up and down. “Ah!” I thought. “They are shadows. But of what? Maybe they are shadows of straight tree branches higher up, and the curves result from their projections onto the cylindrical trunk.”
Looking closer, and a little higher, I noticed wires crossing in front of the tree — wires that I had seen many times before but had forgotten about:
“Aha!” I realized. The “marks” are shadows of those wires, not permanent marks at all, and when breezes move the wires, the shadows move, too. “Mystery solved.”
But I also thought that, if I were so inclined, I could climb a ladder and trace the shadows with a permanent black marker to make them last. Then other people could wonder how and why they got there.
Instead, I have memorialized them in this essay to you, to illustrate that our perceptions and understandings are often more ephemeral, tenuous, and inaccurate than we first (or maybe ever) realize, and that we can improve our understandings by examining our perceptions both more closely and from a wider perspective.
