A Tree Called Home

The present author would like to offer, if one may, a sort of pithy advice regarding life. That is, one must aspire to never live in a house, apartment, or other residence in which the amount of housework one must continually pursue is infinite, in order to keep the place neat and tidy. This, of course, renders the amount of livable places rather limited. One might suggest to find, say, a big, towering tree to live in, somewhere pleasantly warm, and to reside, not unlike Tarzan, in the shelter of its branches. At that point, when one asks where you reside, you can respond thusly:

"A tree."

To which your curious communicating acquaintance might questioningly suggest:

"You mean a tree house?"

Given, however, your distinct control, still, over your verbal abilities and vernacular constitution, you could simply correct them:

"No, just a tree."

At which point, it becomes easy to weed out the friends you don't want from the ones you do, as those who might condescendingly raise their eyebrows are no friends of any inhabiter of trees, while those who might prescribe a sort of badassery to residing in nature's quintessential air filter are the friends worth keeping.

False But Earnest

When one says that one might get a cold from being outside in winter without a hat, one does not do so intentionally to deceive or reinforce false data. Their earnestness is merely expressing itself as a false factoid. The harm is not in the actual suggestion, nor the feelings it conveys.

So too is there nothing intentionally harmful about one who attributes the temperature to when leaves change colour and drop (they're driven almost entirely by sunlight, which is why we can predict when they'll peak each year - it's the same time year in and year out with just a small effect driven by precipitation).

These sort of common mistakes - common knowledge passed as accepted wisdom but actually false -- proliferate our daily existence. The present author almost assuredly knows some things that are false. These unknown unknowns, as esteemed international criminal Donald Rumsfeld once explained, haunt us, dangling just out of sight - an ignorance we assume we have but have no way of finding or knowing. A sort of self loss of ego as we stumble around, wondering if the factoid we just explained or correlated was in fact incorrect all along. Even to attempt to research said acceptable data can be a rabbit hole of paranoia and confusion. One merely need look at the entire industry of research and data and ads and guides and self-help of diet and exercise to question what we really know and feel overwhelmed. The fact that we are so often driven by a desire to know what we don't know is one thing, the fact that even once we know something, we might still be wrong, is another thing entirely. As always, the end result is self-doubt.

The Folly of Familiarity

It's been said that, next to writing, the most important thing one can do to improve one's writing is to read more. To read both the familiar and unfamiliar, popular and unpopular, books of styles and genres and variations to learn from and grow from and utilize. Alas, one also finds that, if one is lacking the ability to harness any of said styles or flourishes (as present author does), then reading a variety of prose, while interesting, only seeks to reinforce the reality that achievement is impossibly fleeting.