Rings and Roots

There’s an oak stump in the front of the red brick house I grew up in. As long as I can remember, my hometown Round Rock, TX has been in drought. I see it in the blighted wood. Wide rings in the youthful middle, when rain was plentiful. Then, thin rings on the outer margins, so crowded they merge. As I recently learned, this journal records years of drought and plenty very differently: the outermost, thinnest, rings show little growth. And Round Rock has dried.

I just turned twenty-two, the oldest young year. Each birthday comes sooner and sooner. I am frightened. Where does all the time go?

Time used to crawl. I have visceral memories of third grade. On school days, I'd run home from Chandler Oaks Elementary and record Java tutorials on YouTube with a laptop with a fan that wheezed under the strain of Eclipse and OBS. For Thanksgiving, my family went camping in the Great Smoky Mountains---I still smell the fragrance of the sweet mountain air, taste the hash brown patties at brunch, feel my frustration at breaking the slingshot I needed to skip stones on the river. I spent the long car ride home drawing isometric sketches of a Lego car I was going to bring to life with a five-dollar RadioShack motor. Every hour was loud and vivid and mine. A wide ring.

Then, college started, and the rings got thin. Life didn't get worse; I got efficient. At my core I am a maximalist who loves intense work, and the Bay is the natural habitat for people like me. For three years my days have blurred together between Cursor, arXiv, and Ghostty, punctuated with meals I don't remember and walks around the same blocks. I was happy. I am happy. But Tuesday was Saturday was November, and the days were full while the months were empty.

Everyone I love here runs on the same beautiful engine---9-9-6, sleep trackers, VO2 max, biological age, months shaved off death as if death were the only thing eating life. I am one of them. We all try to stretch the line. But what if I’ve been optimizing the wrong thing; instead of getting more years, how do we get more year in the year?

Bergson called this durée---time as it's felt, not counted. A clock tells you every year is the same width, but the stump knows better. Bergson thought clocks were a kind of lie---slicing lived time into identical coins when no two minutes have ever been the same substance. A minute of building something you love and a minute of waiting for CI to finish are not the same.

Adjusted for felt time, most people's lives are half-over around twenty-two. I am not ready to half-die.

There is always New. New city, new country, new person, new food, new version of yourself. A thing can only be New once, which gives it this weird monopoly on felt time. But New also decays almost immediately. It starts happening to itself. By the ninth country, something has already thinned. Even surprise begins to repeat.

So maybe widening does not come from motion. I think it comes from presence. A few weeks ago I was walking to work and called my dad. I was telling him about a book I'd been reading. He was telling me about a documentary he'd watched. The air smelled like spring and the sun was warm on my arms. It was a beautiful, mundane morning. It took up more room than most of my weeks.

The tree says it better: the wide rings don't come from moving (duh! trees can’t move!). They come from the tree drinking: roots reaching further and further down. It’s ferocious---a live oak's root system can extend twice as far as its canopy---but the hunger points downward into what is already here.

I'm a maximalist. I don't want to slow down or simplify or retreat into curated stillness. I want to live at full volume. But full volume != full speed. It means full contact. The droughted tree doesn't passively receive the rain. It reaches down.