Why We Love Old Trees
Perhaps it was never really the tree we were admiring. Perhaps we were looking for permission.
Watch what people do beside a very old tree. They slow down. Their voices drop. Someone lays a hand flat against the bark, the way you might touch the shoulder of an elderly relative. Children try to get their arms around the trunk and fail, delighted. Nobody does this for a sapling, however pretty. Nobody stands in reverent silence in front of a garden-centre conifer.
There is an old olive tree on one of my regular walks. The trunk is twisted almost in half, hollow enough in places to see daylight through, and grey as driftwood. By any standard we apply to ourselves, it is a wreck. And every time I pass it I think the same thing: how beautiful. For a while now I have been asking myself why I am so generous to the tree and so much stingier with the woman in the mirror.
Roots
The moon makes us feel small in space. An old tree makes us feel small in time, which is a different and rather gentler thing. This one was already old when your grandmother was a girl. It has stood through wars, droughts, fashions and governments, and it is still here, entirely unbothered by your inbox. Standing beside it, your own bad week takes its proper place in a much longer story.
It also teaches something we tend to forget. Most of a tree is where you cannot see it. The roots usually spread far wider than the branches, and they are the reason the whole thing is still standing after the storm.
By midlife, most of what holds us up is underground too. The friendships that have lasted thirty years. The skills you no longer notice you have. The things you have already survived. We live in a culture that only counts what is visible, so we rarely count any of it. Ask yourself what is holding you up that you never give credit to. The answer is usually longer than you expect.
Rings
A tree keeps everything. Each year lays down a ring: wide in the generous years, narrow in the years of drought. The thin rings are never removed. They sit there in the trunk for good, and they are part of what holds the tree up.
We are far less honest about our own history. By midlife most of us carry a few years we would happily edit out. The marriage that ended. The career that went sideways. The decade that seemed to disappear into caring for everyone else. We call them wasted and try to tell our story around them.
Psychologists who study life stories have found something worth knowing here. People who can describe a hard chapter and say what it gave them tend to be happier, and more generous towards the next generation, than people who simply leave it out. The facts of the two lives may be identical. The telling is what differs. So keep the thin rings. Take your hardest year and finish this sentence honestly: because of that year, I now…
Scars
Listen to the words we use for an old tree: weathered, gnarled, majestic, full of character. Now listen to the words we use for a woman of the same vintage. She has "let herself go", or, as the highest available compliment, she "doesn't look her age". The sociologist in me cannot leave that alone. Susan Sontag called it the double standard of ageing back in 1972, and it has barely shifted since. We learned to read every line on a tree as beauty and every line on ourselves as failure, and neither reading is natural. Both were taught.
This matters far beyond vanity. The Yale psychologist Becca Levy followed hundreds of people over two decades and found that those who held positive beliefs about their own ageing lived, on average, seven and a half years longer than those who dreaded it. What we believe about growing older quietly shapes how we do it.
Old trees have one more thing to say about this. An ancient oak does not keep reaching upwards for ever. At a certain age it lets its highest branches go, grows lower and broader, and puts its energy into the wood that matters. Arborists call it retrenchment, and it is how a tree lives for another few hundred years. It is a strategy, and nobody looking at the tree would call it decline. So when you find yourself saying no more often, wanting fewer people and less noise, do not assume you are fading. You may simply be growing in the right direction at last.
A small test for the mirror, then. Before you say something about your own face or body, ask whether you would say it about an old oak. If you would not, leave it unsaid.
Canopy
Part of why we love old trees is very simple. We love them because they shelter us. An old tree gives more shade than a young one, and it is home to far more life: birds in the hollows, insects in the bark, a whole small world in the crook of a branch. The older and more broken it gets, the more it holds.
Erik Erikson believed the central task of midlife was what he called generativity, the turn from building your own life towards tending the lives that come after it. Most women I work with are already doing this without a name for it. They are the canopy. Children, ageing parents, younger colleagues and friends in trouble all stand under them, usually at the same time. It is tiring, and it is also one of the deepest sources of meaning this stage of life has to offer. Both things are true.
But a tree does not hold up a canopy through goodwill. It holds it up because it is still feeding itself, every season, through its own roots. Shelter with nothing going in at the bottom is how branches come down. So here is the practical question. Who is standing under you at the moment, and what do you need this month in order to keep standing? Name one thing, and put it in the diary as though it were someone else's appointment.
Seeds
This week, find the oldest tree within walking distance. It need not be famous. A churchyard, a village square or the end of your own road will do. Put your phone away, lay a hand on the bark, and stay for two minutes. Then ask yourself three questions.
Roots. What is holding me up that I never give credit to?
Rings. Which hard year am I still trying to edit out, and what did it give me?
Canopy. Who shelters under me, and what do I need so that I can keep growing?
Write the answers down when you get home. They take ten minutes, and they will tell you more about where you are than most of the things you have been worrying about.
This is the last post in The Unexpected Psychology of Midlife, and trees are the right place to end. Looking back, every piece in this series turned out to be about the same thing. We were never only looking at the moon, and we were never only admiring the tree. Each time, we were looking for something we needed to hear about ourselves. The moon offered perspective. The tree offers permission: to be marked by your own life, to grow at your own pace, to take up room and to be here for a long time yet.
One last thing about that olive tree on my walk. Twisted, hollow and grey as it is, it still flowers every spring and still carries fruit every autumn. An old tree does not stop blooming. It simply stops apologising for the shape it blooms in.
Perhaps that is what we were hoping for all along, standing there with a hand on the bark. We wanted to know that growing older could look like this, and it can. You have been doing it for years.
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