Adam Has a Podcast Episode 42; The Tale of Two Branches

When I was younger, I fell out of a tree and landed on a fence, like, right there, right at the raised the bread basket. And I bounced off of the fence, and there's a fence, and then there's a car. And I bounced off the fence and then onto the car, and then back into the fence, and then I bounced back onto the car. And I was just sitting there. And my dad told me, don't hang on that branch, because you're getting bigger and you're bigger than you were yesterday today. So if you hang on that branch like you did yesterday, it might not be able to handle the weight like it will today. And of course, I didn't listen to him because as a human being, you don't perceive these changes over time. So, just as he predicted, I believed as though it was a safe branch to hang upon. I didn't feel any heavier today than I did yesterday. So I went on the branch and I pretended to be a monkey, and I was hanging onto it, jumping around in my Spider Man hoodie. And previously to this event.... I have been hanging on the branch before because I loved playing on this tree. And I heard it crack, and I went, "Oh, I gotta be more careful when I'm hanging on this branch." And I remembered what my dad had said, and I went, "Oh, this is exactly what he's talking about. But I know better. I know this tree better than he knows this tree. I know just how much weight this branch can take. But in reality, the tree knows the tree better than anybody else. And when a time came to teach me a certain lesson, I didn't listen. And so I was monkeying around, hanging on the branch, bouncing up and down. And it snapped. and I fell. And I still have a scarf for this day, right here, a little. It looks like a puncture, but it's just like a little piece of like how scars are, little pieces of missing skin. But when I was laying there on the ground, I really did feel like, oh my God, I just I just broke someplace. I thought I was gonna die. And there was a moment there where I was trying to cry out for help, but of course, the bread basket knocks the wind out of you, so I... couldn't really get enough oomph, and I'm pretty sure my parents were inside or in the basement, which I has a back door and the back door is open so they theoretically thought they could hear me. But I was screaming and I was screaming and I was screaming and I was crying and I was crying and I was crying. And I realized, nobody's coming to save me. And so I sat there and I accepted the situation. And it hurt a lot. But I reminded myself of when I burned my hand, and it had hurt so much the first time, but then the second time it didn't hurt as much. because apparently I love touching in fire in hot stoves. I think I burned my hand like a lot of times when I was little. I've burned my hands so much that when I burn my hands now, it's not a thought unless it's a pretty bad one. And when it's a pretty bad one, it gets to be a little triggering because I'm like, oh, I remember being fucking three years old and burning my hand. And so I kind of remembered that, oh, this is my first experience with this kind of pain. And when I burnt my hand for the first time, it felt like the end of the world, but it wasn't. And I'm still here. So this must not be the end of the world either. And I had all the different kinds of possibilities floating through my head, like, oh, my God, did I puncture my lung? Oh, my God, did I break a rib? Oh, my God, am I, you know, going to be crippled now because I landed on the car, like, hurt my back my life. You know how like you I went like that onto the car and overextended my back in an arch. Because when I was little two, one time my sister and my brother were roughhousing and my brother threw my sister under the couch so hard that she lost feeling in her legs. She landed on like a bouncy ball that was inside the couch cushions that nobody knew was there. And it, like, shocked the nerves so much that she couldn't feel her legs. And I remember that they couldn't get her out of the house without the, like a special kind of gurney because they were afraid of a spinal fracture. So they had to wait for the fire department to get there and then they loaded up her up on one of those yellow fire department girdles and strapped her down so that she wouldn't move during transit. And then I think they, I'm not sure about this. I don't know if they put her in the ambance or if they put her in the fire truck. I'm not sure about that, but then they rushed her to a big hospital, a bigger hospital than our local hospital.. So I had that running through my mind, too. I was like, oh, my God. I. It was like. have my mind running a million miles a minute and I was left alone long enough to adequately assess my own reality. And so my attempt to go outwards failed, and in my mind, I rationalize this as I need to go inwards. So I went inwards, and I kept doing these somatic scans. And like a pain impulse is like a trigger for a somatic scan, because your body locates where the pain stimulus is coming from, and then instinctually, you're programmed to retract from wherever, you know, I'm feeling pain here, if I'm going to attract, I feeling pain here, I'm going attract to you. Wherever the pain's coming from, you instinctually pull away from it. So the pain signal in and of itself is an involuntary somatic scan. triggered at the impetus of a pain stimulus. What I had done was replay the somatic scan over and over and over and over. I kept returning my awareness to the sources of the pain and then to the overall system. And after, like, I don't know. It felt like forever. I slowly started to regain my strength again, and I could kind of pick myself back up. And I dragged myself inside and sought out my parents. Now, since I'm moving around talking, walk and being a highly conscious individual through this experience of recanting the pain as a small child, my parents assumed, well, he's moving around. So it must not be fatal. He's on up and moving around. He's not on the ground anymore. They didn't know I was on the ground for a while. Because I was still crying. They thought when I came inside, it had just happened, that I had just f fallen out of the tree. They didn't know that I had spent some time recovering outside, yelling for help for a while. and I was trying to inform them of that. I was like, what the fuck, guys? You're supposed to be listening. What the hell? Where's your priorities? Having a little kid, check a p parents' priorities is a little jarring, so they must have not clocked that. But that's what I was trying to do. Like, the hell, guys, you fucking left me out there on the pavement screaming for help for like fucking 15, 20 minutes. I got quiet, too, because I was like, I accepted death at one point. I was like, "This is death. I'm dying right now. I got quiet and I was like, there's nothing else I can do because my body's dying and I can't do anything except accept it because it's broken. I just ruined a vital thing to the system. I can't survive past this. That's what I started thinking. And I had to rationalize myself out of that to realize, well, it hurts a lot, but I can still get up and move. and maybe that's the same rationalization. You know, my parents carry too. Like I was saying, he's up and moving. I had to come around to the realization that even if I have some kind of grave injury, I can still move so I should at least do my best to get to my parents or someone responsible. and try and inform them of what had just happened so that they could make a medical assessment or decide to take me to the hospital themselves. Because. I have also had experience at this point in time that the hospital is where you go when you want to save people, that sometimes you can save people, and we have medical magic that can, you know, make something that would have been life ending 300 years ago, you know, survivable injury today. And so that's what that's the avenue I was going down. I was like,Do I need to go to the hospital? And they checked me out and I was relatively fine. You know, like I said, I was up and moving around. I was talking and and breathing fine. My dad had a stethoscope, so he listened to me and he said, yeah, it doesn't sound like your lungs are punctured or anything. So your lungs sound fine. Um.. And they did their best to reassure me. now that they were informed. But I think I was upset about how long it took for them to become informed, because I was still young, I was still. operating on this perception of like, my parents know everything that's going on with me. And so to have a moment that my dad forewarned me about and then I fell out of the tree and then to not have my parents there to help me through it. I was like, well, what was the point of forewarning me if you weren't going to be there when it happened. But that was the point of forewarning me was that, hey, man, this could happen when I'm not here. And you could be in this exact scenario. And I got lucky that it did happen when they were there, and I got lucky in the way that it did happen. Because he saw the worst case scenario. and imagined the worst thing ever, and I saw the best case scenario and imagined the giving tree, basically, even though I don't think I ever read that book. But this tree was my giving tree. This tree gave to me. But like trees take a long time to grow, so they planted it when they first moved in. And then by the time I came around, it was a climbable fucking tree. So we have like a generational family giving tree. Maybe I always read that book when I was really young, but... I wasn't conscious enough of it to retain it to full capacity or to really hold on to the memory. Or maybe I'm purposefully ignoring the fact that I read it already so that I go back and read it again, so that I feel interested in going back and reading it again. Huh. But.. Yeah, that tree was my giving tree, so I saw the most positive outcome of this tree will never hurt me. My dad saw the most negative outcome of, dude, this could be a life and death scenario of this branch that you liked to. hang on. And reality met somewhere in the middle where I got the luckiest outcome. Maybe my positivity weighed with his negativity in the way that it created an experience that I could learn the lesson that he was trying to convey while also surviving the scenario that he wanted me to understand with wisdom and not experience. Yeah, that's the thing, too. What is wisdom without experience, if not just unfounded assumptions? If you don't have the empirical data to back up the experience. I think I can look at this metaphorically, looking back to to the tree. Because my experience of the tree was different than his experience of the tree. He was already an adult. By the time the tree had grown up, he knew that there were branches that he couldn't hang on. But I was growing with this tree. And right where I liked to climb, there were two branches. And there was the smaller one in the bigger one. And I used to love hanging on the smaller one because it was up a little bit higher. It was the highest branch I could reach. But one day. that branch cracked under my weight, and that's when I said, IOh no, I can't hang on this branch too much without it breaking. And so I decided, well, there's another branch right here. I'll just hang on the bigger branch. I know that the smaller branch can't support me anymore, but that doesn't mean that I still can't hang on this bigger, thicker branch. If you want to look at it like wisdom and experience, wisdom is the smaller branch, didn't have enough support. or weight behind it or size or capacity. I like that word about here. to handle the reality without snacknapping. And so, in the sense of this metaphor, I didn't know what I was doing this, but when I moved to the thicker, sturdier, more stable branch, in my mind, I was moving to the more secure object, but in the context of this metaphor that I'm overlaying on it now, I was moving away from unfounded wisdom into wisdom founded in experience. If you don't know, why you're doing what you're doing,. You'll run into a lot of hiccups, and some things are unforeseen like your favorite branch snapping. Right right at the moment that everybody is occupied and busy and can't hear you. Something you trust, which was the branch. Breaking right at the perfect moment. For me, it created an experience I was able to learn from and become a stronger individual from. I knew now that there were things that I could survive, that others thought I couldn't. My dad didn't think that I could survive that branch snapping, and so he stressed the point and wanted me to live with some unfounded wisdom and the lack of an experience, because he didn't believe I would be able to handle the weight of the experience. And when I said no, I know better who I am, I was able to prove his assumption wrong, that I was able to survive the experience. And it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be. In a perfect world, unfounded wisdom would work. You would listen carefully the first time, every time someone is speaking. But we go through these learning curves. Intelligence is a bellgraph, I think I remembered reading or quoting from somewhere. You go from "I know nothing to "I know everything. There's so much out there, I couldn't possibly know everything about everything. But I know something about some things. It's always the recognition of the fact of what you do know and what you don't know. And that's not something else anybody else can ever tell you, which is why unfounded wisdom doesn't always work. because sometimes you have to know. And I think that there's a subtle analogy here. that maybe, no matter how much you try, you can't guideide another's destiny. because destiny is of one's own choosing. It may be a preordained path that you could follow, but free will dictates that you can step on and off that path whenever you want. People don't always realize that they have the freedom to walk off of the path and into the broader fields. They get stuck in these pedantic ruts of routines and rules in the way that they're told that reality works. But the experience of having been told told don't hang on that branch and then thinking I know better, and then having that branch break, and then being left alone to deal with the consequences, and then getting to the point of realization that I need to dust myself off and pick myself back up. That experience ingrained a level of awareness and intelligence that I wouldn't have gained if I had listened to my dad and I had stopped hanging on the branches entirely. I no longer live in my childhood home, so I don't have access to the trees to climb it if I wanted to. But I'm sure that for a while there, even when I did live at home as an adult, I know for a fact, I need to climb that tree anymore. Just the other day, my friends visited, and I climbed a tree that overlooked a cliff. And I got out on the edge, and I went over the edge. They were saying, "No, no, no, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it." And I cut up my legs a little bit, so maybe that's what they were worried about that I would get hurt. But I knew that in the capacityity that I would get hurt did not outweigh the capacity at which the tree could provide me fun. And I think.. good hearted, clean, fun, that comes from a positive place and a good nature is always good for everybody. There's different kinds of fun out there. And I went into that before with the fun scale. Fun is very subjective, and if you want to measure what you think is fun, go check out that episode, because it helps you bring it to the awareness of your subjective opinion towards what you perceive as fun. And then gives you a framework of then if you're stuck on like, oh, I forget how to have fun. It gives you a framework of establishing a tangible artifact of your perception of fun. And to be quite honest, I do not know how I just pulled this one out, so I'm feeling the current leave me right now. And I'm like, oh, wow, that was amazing. I'm going to leave it right here so I don't mess it up anymore. Oh, that's not the fanciest closing argument. But I'm like, wow. I felt the current come and now I'm feeling the current leaving. So I think that's where I'll leave it today. You got to decide for yourself what the message in this one is today, because I don't have any pre-words to wrap it up. I hope it was poignant and thought provoking enough. and I hope you enjoy it. And Anyways, please hope.