Timber!
I’ve been thinking a lot about my actions and how what I do affects the environment around me. That environment can range from the actual earth's environment to the environment in an office or among your friend groups. I moved into my house about seven years ago and back then my backyard was lined with these full and vibrant 20 foot tall trees. Over the years they have died off one by one and I recently had to call an arborist to cut down the remaining five because they were weak and leaning against my neighbors fence. They also presented a safety issue because strong winds could have potentially knocked them over. I struggled with cutting them down because I knew that birds and squirrels had made some of these trees their home and I don’t like to disrupt what little wild life can exist in an urban city like Portland.
But owning a home means you also have to think about your neighbors, so down the trees came. I worried that the birds and the squirrels would boycott my yard but that never happened, my yard is still full of them. They simply moved to the other healthier trees in the area. An unexpected result of having no trees along the back fence is that I can see a lot more around me now. I know we tend to like our privacy and trees provide that for our homes but I was amazed at how much more of my neighborhood I can see from my back window now. Light also fills my backyard in a way it never did before making my early morning wake ups a bit more pleasant.
All of this got me thinking about the barriers that we intentionally put up in our lives. We put them up for our own protection. We put them up so that we don’t have to deal with certain situations or certain people. We even put them up because we simply want to be alone. Obviously I’m not saying that trees are bad and neither are fences, walls or other barriers. However, sometimes barriers don’t just keep things out, they keep us in. They can keep us unaware of what is going on around us. They don’t just protect us from “the bad” they can prevent us from seeing all of the good and all of the colors and all of the life that is going on so close to us.
Barriers aren’t always physical either. Sometimes they come in the form of a title you hold in the workplace and just like a brick wall your title can prevent you from seeing what’s going on around you. It becomes easier to lose perspective should an issue arise. When I took a leadership position years ago at my job I made it a point of requesting that I still be allowed to do at least some of the work that drew me to the organization in the first place. I didn’t want my title to insulate me against the community that I serve or against my coworkers. I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t block the light from reaching me.
