Change Loves Company
"Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast."
— Charles Dickens
Trees adapting to change along the eastern coast of the Cap de Corse, on island of Corsica. 120mm photo by the author.
Big change rarely arrives alone. When one thing shifts, it pulls other things with it. Ones you didn't plan for. Ones you didn't ask for. The human instinct, almost always, is to grip what's familiar while everything else settles back into place. But change doesn't work that way. The ripples are part of it. Resisting them is often what makes the adjustment harder than it needs to be.
The real question isn't how to stop the ripples. It's whether you know yourself well enough to move with them, in your way.
What the Trees Already Know
Spend enough time outdoors and you start to notice that not all trees respond to stress the same way. When a pine tree begins to lean, say a creek bank is washing out beneath it and gravity is starting to win, it responds by building what botanists call compression wood on the underside of the lean. It pushes upward from below, bracing against the pressure, reinforcing from the bottom up.
A deciduous tree does the opposite. It builds tension wood on the upper side of the lean, on the high side of the slope, and pulls itself upright through the root system above. It doesn't push against the pressure from below. It draws itself back up from above.
Both trees survive. Both strategies work. The difference isn't which method is better. The only question is which one are you?!
Nobody Can Answer That For You
This is the part that trips people up. We often look outward for feedback on how to respond to change. We ask our mentors. We model how others handle difficulty. We read about what high performers do. All of that has value, but none of it tells you which tree you are. That answer lives in your own pattern of responses, and it only becomes visible when you pay attention to it.
Do you plant your feet and reinforce from the ground up when pressure arrives? Or do you draw on something higher, relocate your roots, and pull yourself back to vertical from above? There's no wrong answer. But there is a wrong approach, and that's never asking the question.
Luckily, We're Not Starting From Scratch
Here's the good news: you don't have to figure this out in a vacuum. Biology offers us archetypes. So does psychology. Researchers have spent decades studying how people learn and adapt through experience, and the evidence is clear: the way we process difficult experiences is deeply individual, and can be remarkably consistent over time. Your pattern is likely already there. Reflection surfaces it.
History adds another layer. Every generation before us has navigated upheaval. The strategies available to them are available to us. We're not reinventing how humans respond to change. We're identifying which response already lives in us.
And here's the part that makes it interesting: you're not locked in. Sometimes the same person needs to be a pine. Sometimes deciduous. The season changes. The situation changes. You change. That's not inconsistency. That's wisdom, if you're paying attention to and reflecting on your life’s experiences.
Anchor It in Action
Think about the last significant change you navigated. Then ask yourself three questions:
Did I respond by reinforcing what I had, or by pulling toward something new?
Was that response intentional, or was it just what happened?
If I could choose again, would I be a pine or a deciduous?
