I want to attribute this story to Eckhart Tolle but I can’t find it anywhere. Here’s my version.
A father was bringing his young son to the forest for the first time. It was going to be a great day for these city dwellers. They drive into the park, park their car, and start walking toward the trees.
As they approach, the boy stops dead in his tracks and points to a huge, towering pine tree. He gasps, “what’s that?” The father replies, “that’s a tree son.” The boy is utterly astounded at the majesty of this evergreen with all of its precarious needles and rich fullness. The boy notices a squirrel’s nest inside and many, many pine cones. The father urges him to continue walking and promises more delights. Reluctantly, and prematurely for the boy, they walk away.
They walk further and arrive at a weeping willow. The boy is floored by this amazing creature that looks like it’s crying yet has such tremendous strength and girth. The boys runs beneath its huge shaggy branches and feels the coolness of the shade that it provides. With his mouth wide the boy asks, “papa, what’s this?” “That’s a tree son. Let’s carry on.”
They continue down the path and arrive at a wisteria tree in full bloom with its beautiful purple blossoms cascading down so gently and softly. The boy steps beneath the canopy and twirls around and feels the blossoms whispering tranquility to him as his mind dizzies. He falls to his back and starts to cry. His father rushes beneath the wisteria with panic, “what’s wrong?” he demands. The boys continues staring up into the tree unfazed and tearing from joy asks, “what is this father?” “That’s a tree son.”
On the way back to the car the boy visits a birch tree, with its benevolent, paperly white bark, a cherry tree, with its delicious fruit and lovely cherry blossoms as well as its strong supportive arms for climbing, and a eucalyptus tree, feeding creatures, healing us and offering an aroma that blesses its recipients. And each he learns is a “tree”.
This boy had a rare opportunity to understand what can exist within the word “tree”, whereas the rest of us will never fully comprehend the range of characteristics a tree can possess and how it can be so many things depending on how it is seen. It can be supportive, nourishing, healing, protective, beautiful, odorous, strong, yielding, painful, fragile, symbiotic, and so many other things that may even be contrasting.
The mind is exposed to so many things that we need to be hyper efficient at labelling things heuristically so that we quickly know what they are so we can move on to the next thing to comprehend. This is why we enjoy brands so much. They are designed to tell a heuristic narrative about us without ever having to put in the work. She drives a Jeep so she’s adventurous. He drives a BMW so he’s sophisticated and discriminating. We know the label game and we play it.
Kierkegaard famously said, “Once you label me you negate me.” Once we label something we no longer interact with it authentically, instead we interact with the image of that thing in our heads. To people we assign an archetype and then expect and receive exactly what we know (think) to be true. Decision science is dominated by this expectations bias which in cognition, and hence the person’s experience, translates to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Another little story about the self-fulfilling prophecy, which strangely is touted as a joke:
Once there was a young guy who lost one of his eyes to an injury sustained at his job harvesting olives. He wasn’t wealthy, and so the prosthetic eye he used for cosmetic purposes was made of wood instead of the more popular acrylic. He developed serious self-esteem issues related to his wooden prosthetic eye.
A friend of the guy encouraged him to accompany him to a dance one evening so that the guy could meet and socialize with girls. The guy with the wooden eye reluctantly agreed to go with his friend to the dance.
Once the two guys entered the hall where the dance was being held, the friend pointed out a woman with a cleft (“hare”) lip and suggested to the guy that he should perhaps ask the woman to dance with him. Because she herself possessed a physical abnormality, she might be less put off by his wooden eye and more likely to accept his invitation to dance with her.
The man walked over and shyly asked the lady to dance. The woman’s face lit up. In excitement she trumpeted, “Would I!?! Would I!?!”
The man was stunned. All he heard was “Wood eye! Wood eye!,” so he thought he was being insulted brazenly about his wooden eye. In response he screamed, “Hare lip! Hare lip!” and stormed away from this now mortified woman.
His own labels of being undesirable and freakish had tainted his lens such that the dialogue of people around him was contorted to his own self image and expectations, even when it was the opposite.
Nassim Taleb, famed economist, wrote about the black swan phenomenon. Swans are white. Storybooks teach about ugly ducklings turning into beautiful white swans. When we talk about swans it is known by everyone that swans are white so we don’t even have to say white swan because it’s a given. But what happens when someone observes a black swan?
Most likely we’d dismiss this as a dirty swan or big mallard. The more mentally expansive would think about reverse albinism so that the label still remains. But ultimately if black swans do exist then we can no longer call them all swans. We now need to increase the precision of our swan stories by including the colour. And guess what? Black swans do exist and yet we still refer to white swans as swans. This is similar to how natives in North America are still called Indians despite not originating from India. We really hang on to those labels even long into absurdity and foolishness because they help to sustain our self fulfilling prophecies, incorrect beliefs and stereotypes.
Back to the forest story. How can we prevent unnecessary labelling, because in some instances it is useful to group things into categories? The answer is simple. The father could’ve rather said, “that is a thing we call a tree.” This allows the child to understand that we are not defining the characteristics of something exhaustively but rather we are simply naming it for linguistic ease. And by using the indefinite article (“a”) versus the definite article (“the”) the child is taught that the name applies only to this creature being observed and not the group.
Alternatively, the child could have rather been told the actual names of the trees versus the grouping “tree”. Calling something a tree is like calling a person a human. It’s accurate but it abstracts away the differences among them and also represents the entire grouping in however it presents. A white birch tree could not be more different then a baobab tree as much as Mother Theresa could not be more different than Donald Trump, so calling them both humans is a disservice to the learner.
Your own labels limit your own ability to grow in the eyes of those who know you. Your actual name that you’ve had since birth. The nickname you got in college. The title you have at work.
Assist people to interact with you and not the image they have of you in their minds or that which they create from your heuristics. If your entire environment automatically treats you like you’re saying ‘wood eye’ and not ‘would I’, then it’s worthwhile to invest the time to challenge and remove labels. And ensure you learn from ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’ who boldly rebranded himself from his birth name only to have a new unflattering label imposed by those who failed to understand his attempt at liberation. Then do likewise for the labels you carry and honour those things by discarding your labels so that the thing can define itself.
