(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Evolution: Part Five – The Tree: Living S.A.F.E. [1] ['Douglas Schonenberg', 'Chitown Kev', 'Belinda Ridgewood'] Date: 2026-08-11 On discovering that the journey was never about finding the tree. For a long time, I believed that I was walking toward something. A destination. A place where everything would finally make sense. A place where I belonged, where I fit in, where I would not feel like an outsider. A place where the questions would stop. A place where I would finally become the person that I was supposed to be. For years, I imagined that there would be a tree on top of a hill that would was waiting for me. Not just any tree. The tree. The one that I had been searching for ever since I stepped through the front door of that house. The house where I learned about Surrender, Acceptance and Forgiveness. The place where the path that had taught me Evolution was taking me. The place where the journey that I have been on for my entire life would finally end. I smiled. I no longer believed that. Mylo glanced over. “What are you smiling about?” “I’ve had the song, Vienna by Billy Joel, stuck in my head all morning.” He laughed. “I noticed. You have been humming the tune for a while now.” I laughed. “I’ve heard that song hundreds of times.” “But I don’t think that I ever really understood its meaning until today.” “What changed?” Mylo asked. I smiled. “I did.” For a few moments, I quietly sang the melody. Then I said the words that had suddenly taken on a completely different meaning. “Slow down, you crazy child…” I smiled. “And later…” “Vienna waits for you.” I let the words hang in the air for a moment. “When I was younger, I thought Vienna was simply a song about slowing down.” “I thought Billy Joel was telling us to stop working so hard.” “To enjoy life.” “To stop rushing toward whatever we thought we needed to become.” Mylo smiled. “And now?” I looked out over the winding path before us. “Now I think it is about something deeper.” “For most of my life…” “I thought I was behind where I was supposed to be.” “I thought I had to hurry and catch up to everybody else.” “I thought that there would come a day when I had finally arrived at my destination.” He waited as I continued. “I finally understand that there is not an arrival.” “There is only becoming.” Mylo smiled. “Trees don’t hurry.” I looked over. “No?” Mylo continued. “They simply grow.” “One ring.” “One season.” “One sunrise.” “One storm.” “At a time.” I smiled. “So Vienna was never really about reaching a destination.” “No.” Mylo answered. “It’s permission.” “Permission?” I asked. “Permission to stop measuring your life by how far you have gone and begin to measure it by how deeply you have grown.” We continued walking. Neither of us hurried. There was no reason to. The path wound gently through another valley before climbing one final hill. As we reached the top… I saw it. A great tree that stood alone against the afternoon sky. Its branches stretched wide. Its leaves danced quietly in the breeze. Its shade stretched across the hillside as though inviting weary travelers to rest. Something about the tree was calling to me. I was drawn to it. Without thinking, I walked toward it. I finally left the path that I was following for as long as I could remember. Not because I had reached the end of my journey. But, because, for the first time in my life… I was no longer in a hurry. When I reached the tree, I rested my hand against its trunk. The bark felt rough. Strong. Weathered. Alive. The type of bake that had survived many storms and continued the o grow. It felt strangely familiar. “I feel like I have been looking for this tree my whole life.” Mylo quietly shook his head. “No.” “You have been searching for yourself.” I looked at him. “What do you mean?” He rested his hand against the trunk beside mine. “The acorn.” “The roots.” “The storms.” “The rings.” “The house.” “The path.” “The forest.” “The backpack.” “They were never leading you to the tree.” “They were providing you with the tools to grow your own.” I looked back across the valley. The house where the journey began. The winding path. The forest. The changing seasons. The storms. The fallen branches. The old stump with its hidden rings. Every lesson. Every mistake. Every triumph. Every loss. Every ordinary day. Every extraordinary one. A memory quietly returned. “The acorn.” “I never planted it.” “No.” Mylo agreed. “You didn’t.” “Your parents gave you life.” “They gave you your beginning.” “The world gave you the circumstances that would define the person that you became.” “Life decided where the acorn first fell.” I stood there quietly. Thinking about everything I had never chosen that has affected my life. The family I was born into. The father who left. The stepfather who arrived. The childhood I never would have chosen. The accident. The storms. The losses. The unexpected gifts. “So who grew the tree?” Mylo smiled. “You did.” “One choice.” “One season.” “One ring.” “At a time.” Something inside me became very still. For years I had searched for a new place where I belonged. Now I understood. The tree had never been waiting for me. I had been growing into it. I smiled. “I am the tree.” Mylo smiled back. “Yes.” “The acorn was given to you.” “The tree is how you responded to everything that has happened to you.” I closed my eyes and sighed. For the first time in my life… I wasn’t trying to become someone else. I wasn’t trying to become the man I had been before the accident. I wasn’t trying to become the man I thought everyone expected me to be. I was simply becoming…myself. Not finished. Not perfect. Still growing. Still adding rings. Still reaching toward the sky. But finally…rooted. I looked out across the valley at the marvelous view. For so much of my life, I had believed that becoming someone meant accomplishing something. Finding the right career. Making the right decisions. Reaching the right destination. Becoming successful. Becoming wiser. Becoming someone that I could finally be proud of. Now I understood something much simpler. Maybe life isn’t nearly as complicated as we make it. Maybe life is very simple. Maybe all life truly is: Each day we wake up. We do the best that we can with the day we have been given. We learn something. We experience something. We make mistakes. We laugh. We love. We hurt. We grow. And then, we go back to sleep. The next morning, we wake up and do it again. One day at a time. One step at a time. One ring at a time. Until one day, we don’t wake up. And that isn’t failure. That is simply the end of our walk through the great forest. I smiled. Suddenly, I understood why Vienna had been in my head all morning. “Slow down, you crazy child…” Maybe that was the lesson that I had spent my entire life learning. I had spent so much of my life rushing toward the person I thought that I was supposed to become that I had forgotten to live as the person I already was. And maybe that’s what “Vienna waits for you” really meant. Not that some destination was waiting for me. But that life itself was waiting for me to stop rushing through it and simply enjoy it. The journey wasn’t about getting somewhere else. It was about being where I already am. Today. This step. This season. This life. I finally understood the lesson that life was trying to teach me. There was nothing I needed to hurry toward. I was already becoming. The journey was never about reaching some perfect version of myself. It was about living the day I was given… and becoming a little more myself while I was living it. I smiled. “I think…” I said quietly. “I’m tired.” Mylo smiled. “I know.” I continued. “I am not tired of living life.” “I am just tired of searching; of walking that next step: of making that next ring.” He nodded. “You have been searching for something your entire life.” I nodded. “I think that I am old like to sit here for a while under this tree. It seems like a good place to rest and just enjoy the scenery.” “I thought you might.” Mylo said. We sat down under the tree and beneath the branches. The breeze moved softly through the leaves. Birds sang somewhere above us. The afternoon sun filtered gently through the canopy. I slipped my backpack from my shoulders and placed it beside me. It was still full. It always would be. Inside were the masks. The prison key. The memories. The photographs. The mirror. The laughter. The failures. The victories. The scars. The people who stayed. The people who left. Every ring of my life. Every step that I took. Every experience that I had. Everything that I experienced, that gave me the tools to become who I now am would always be with me in this backpack. I smiled. Not because the backpack had become lighter. But because I had finally learned how to carry it. I looked back over everything that had brought me here. “Surrender was the roots.” Mylo nodded. “Acceptance was the seasons.” “Forgiveness was the decision to keep walking.” “And Evolution.” He smiled. “Was the life that grows because of all three.” I laughed. “So they were never separate?” “No.” “They were always one tree.” For a long time neither of us spoke. The silence felt comfortable. Peaceful. For years I had believed that wisdom meant finally having all the answers. Now I wondered if wisdom was something much simpler. Maybe wisdom isn’t knowing all the answers. Maybe wisdom is knowing which questions to ask. That was something Evolution had taught me. The questions I asked when I was younger were often about things I could never control. Why did this happen? Why didn’t life turn out the way I had planned? Why did people hurt me? Why did I have to lose what I lost? They were questions that I was never going to find the answers to. But as I evolved, my questions changed. Now they were questions that I could answer. What can I learn from this? What can I control? Who do I want to become? What do I do with what life has given me? And perhaps the greatest part of wisdom is understanding that I may never find every answer. Maybe I don’t need to. Some answers aren’t waiting at the end of the path. Some answers are revealed only by walking it. One step. One experience. One season. One ring. At a time. Maybe that is what life has been teaching me all along. Not every question has an immediate answer. Some answers take a lifetime to grow. Maybe wisdom is knowing how to sit with someone who doesn’t have all the answers yet. Maybe wisdom is becoming the kind of person someone else feels safe sitting beside. Just then… I heard footsteps. Someone was walking up the hill. I looked down toward the path. A stranger slowly approached the tree. There was something familiar in the way the stranger walked. Not because I knew this person. But because I remembered what it felt like to be uncertain about where the path was leading. The stranger stopped a few feet away. “Do you mind if I sit here?” I smiled. “Of course not.” The stranger quietly sat beneath the branches. For a while neither of us spoke. The wind moved softly through the leaves above us. Finally, the stranger looked over. “My life has fallen apart.” I nodded. “I am sorry to hear that.” “What do I do now?” the stranger asked. I looked at Mylo. He simply smiled. Just as he had done so many times before. He didn’t answer. He never had. He had never told me what to do. He had simply given me the tools to discover my own answers. Now… it was my turn to pass those tools on. As the stranger settled beneath the tree, something caught their attention. An acorn lay in the grass beside them. The stranger reached down and picked it up. The stranger looked at the acorn. “What is this?” I smiled. “An acorn.” The stranger looked at me. I nodded toward the acorn. “It’s yours.” The stranger looked confused. “Mine?” “Yes.” I answered. “Every tree starts somewhere.” I looked down at the acorn in the stranger’s hand. “I had one once.” “I didn’t plant it.” “Neither did you.” “You do not get to choose where life plants you.” “You do not get to choose your first season.” “But you do get to decide how you are going to grow.” The stranger looked at the acorn again. I didn’t take it. It wasn’t mine to take. It belonged to the stranger. The stranger’s journey had begun. And just like mine… the stranger would have to grow their own tree. I pulled my backpack closer. The stranger watched curiously as I opened it. Inside were all of the things that I had carried throughout my journey. The masks. The prison key. The photographs. The mirror. The memories of every season of my life. Then… buried beneath them… my hand found something very familiar. I smiled. “I almost forgot that this was still here.” Carefully, I lifted out of my backpack an old wooden chessboard. Its corners were worn smooth. The hinges creaked softly as I opened it. The leather pouch holding the pieces had faded with age. The stranger looked at the board. “You carried a chessboard with you all this time?” I nodded. “Ever since someone taught me that playing with it was not really about chess.” I untied the leather pouch. The pieces slipped gently into my hand. One by one, I placed them on the board. White. Black. White. Black. The same way that they had once been placed before me. When the board was ready, I turned it. The white pieces faced me. The black pieces faced the stranger. I looked up. “Have you ever played chess?” “A little.” I smiled. “So have I.” I reached forward and moved my king’s pawn two squares. The familiar opening. My fingers rested gently on the piece before I let it go. “When I first learned to play this game.” “I thought the first move belonged to me.” “I eventually realized that it never did.” The stranger looked confused. I smiled. “Life always makes the first move.” “It decides where we are born.” “It chooses our parents.” “It brings us love.” “It brings us loss.” “It sends storms into our lives that we never asked for.” “It plants the acorn.” I looked down at the pawn. “My entire life.” “I spent too much of my time trying to control that first move.” “I never could” “The only move that has ever belonged to me…” “…was the one that came next.” I looked across the chessboard. The stranger held the acorn in one hand. Their other hand rested near the chess pieces. Mylo sat quietly beside us. I looked at the stranger. And then I realized something. The stranger wasn’t someone I was here to teach. The stranger wasn’t someone who needed my answers. The stranger was simply another person standing at the beginning of a path; who was looking for the tools to take a step forward. Just as I once had. And suddenly… I understood why the stranger had found this tree that I was sitting under. Why I had been drawn to this tree. Why Mylo had helped me to walk the path that had led me to this tree and this hill. This was not the end of my journey. It was the beginning of the stranger’s. And perhaps, it is the beginning of yours. Because if you have made it this far into these pages, then you are no longer simply reading about my journey. You are preparing to begin your own. You are sitting beneath the tree with me. You have heard the stories. You have walked the path. You have seen the forest. You have carried the backpack. You have held your own acorn. And now… the chessboard is in front of you. I looked down at the board. The white pawn sat exactly where I had placed it. Life had made its first move. Just like I had made mine. Now it was the stranger’s turn. I looked up. Not at the stranger. At you. Life has already made its first move. The next one belongs to you. It’s your move. Thank you for sitting under the tree with me and listening to my musings. If you enjoyed this musing, please consider subscribing to my Substack, Musings Under the Tree. I write about empathy, personal growth, Being S.A.F.E., politics from time to time, and whatever else wanders through my mind while sitting under the tree. https://musingsunderthetree.substack.com/p/welcome-to-my-tree?r=1s6ofh [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/11/800082680/community/evolution-part-five-the-tree-living-s-a-f-e/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/