I visited with a college professor yesterday. He taught that biology class series that changed my life. Yesterday I had the opportunity to tell him so.

The class was environmental science, and it was a required class for my course of study, (forestry). I have already told you that I did not finish this course of study–I am not a silvaculturalist today.

This biology class was part of the reason I quit. The comparison between the things I was learning in the class with the things I was learning in and about the forestry classes and industry were so stark. And I found myself drawn into a fuller and more beautiful observation of the natural world and away from the extractive practices of my youth and of my course of study.

Of the classes I took that year I do not retain very much mensuration, (the branch of mathematics focused on calculating lengths, areas, and volumes of geometric shapes, like tree shapes), I could not easily, if called upon, estimate the board feet in a stand of timber today.

But I still happily keep and occasionally refer to my copy of Pojar and Mackinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast as well as my Oregon State dichotomous key. I’ve added to the list the Sibley guide to Trees and more recently, (and perhaps more delightfully), Pete Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. I entered the program thinking of logging. I left the program thinking of the preservation of our natural world. Not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive! This is not a political statement. Don’t get weird. My house is made of wood.

I went into that class very dubious about its value in my life. I spent a year measuring logs both standing and lying, and counting insects, and learning about the impacts we have on our natural world and learning lessons about hairbrushes broken too easily.

I could not have articulated the change it made in me at the time. But in hindsight I see that it was a point of inflection and it changed my perspective. Which did in turn affect my values, which catalyzed beliefs in my life, which had forever impacted my vision and mission.

Many of my actual behaviors and thoughts and actions in life have ultimately been affected by this class and I’m grateful.

When I visited my professor, (the first time we’d seen one another in more than 20 years), it was as though no time had passed and I remembered why I liked him and his class so.

One thing he showed me as we sat and ate gingerbread in his living room near his warm fire, was thirty years of data he’d collected on bird species present on his 28 acre property. It was delightfully nerdy and reminded me of a dataset I’m collecting.

I have done this values exercise with over 200 people. And at the end of each one, (with permission), I take a photo. A beautiful photo of the respondent and their choices. I do not publish these photos or share them with the world, but I do look at them myself. I will flick through the album on my phone, land on a person, observe their values, check the date and think about their lives in the days or weeks or months since we sat together. It’s really been a fascinating experience in addition to being a beautiful one.

Interestingly, in the times that I’ve done this, only two people have had a matching set of five values. This says nothing, really, as they are unrelated in any meaningful way and both people will have landed on those choices for different reasons. In fact, out of 57 cards, it’s remarkable that I would even have had a full match at all in only 200 samples–a big number for me, but not a particularly huge dataset.

It’s also notable that there are several cards that are chosen only very seldomly. Preservation of my public Image. Social recognition.

One of my favorite tasty little mysteries, one card has been selected exactly one time.

Acceptance of my portion in life. Submitting to life’s circumstances.

One time. One person. Sitting crosslegged on her living room floor with me. One time. Now what do you make of that?

What does that say about my friend who made this selection, I asked her after the exercise? And what does it say about over 200 other people?

I reflect again on my professor. He does not try to count all the birds in Oregon. He accepts his portion. He accepts his 28 acres and has a beautiful, ring-bound volume of collected data as his reward.

Do you not yield? Do you not submit? Do you not accept the circumstances of your life?

Obviously I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, because as I have noted these are five cards, five choices in comparison with the compendium of human experience. There are fifty seven cards. There must be 57 million things that we could value as humans. Things with words like Kindness or Generosity, or things that are beyond words like a baby’s warmth or a long love in the same direction.

Still, it’s a value that, far from discarding flippantly, I wrestle with. Submission to life’s circumstances.

I have bent my knee to life’s circumstances. Is that always the right choice? Can we value it and still fight, still rage against it? The submission? Or is the fight itself a lack of submitting to the slings and arrows of this life? And is approaching submission as a defeat a sort of defeat in itself?

For what of positive circumstances? Do we submit to those as well, or do we expect them and take them for granted? Do we deserve all that we have? All that we get? All that happens, how it happens and when?

I often think of my college professor and the things I learned in that year. Not just mensuration and dendrology and planned obsolescence. But the things I learned about my own self. It was, as college often is, one of my first experiences outside of my parents’ sphere. I had lived on my own for some years by then. I was accustomed to that Lucky-Charms-and-cheap-beer lifestyle.

But everything I was and wasn’t in those fresh, crispy years of early adulthood was still measured against who I was within the context of my home and family.

And environmental science was a breath of something new. I often wonder–what if I’d stayed in? I make the comment, I’ve made it here, that there’s probably a place where a guy with a big mouth and a big love for people could have made a home with a forestry degree. I could be something really neat, like a park ranger. And instead I am not. I am a coffee roaster, an occupation I have already admitted I do not have a particular passion for. I must accept this. I must let go.

And besides, if I had not followed the life path I did, I may never have developed my dataset, my 200 people, (and counting), I may never have married my partner, I may never have done and seen a million wonderful things.

Not everything is perfect in my life. Not everything is always peachy-keen for an entrepreneur. My business struggles in this post COVID era where people make buying decisions very differently on some levels. Not everything is perfect in my family; my own children are growing up and pushing against boundaries I don’t even know that I should have set in the first place.

In my recent essays I have discussed my faith. Out of something and into something new. Metamorphosis. But what does it mean for the caterpillar? Is there any sense of loss? Probably not for the caterpillar. But for us? As I continue a life-long transformation it is necessary to accept the circumstances of that transformation.

My portion is my portion. My portion is indeterminately good and indefinably difficult. This is true for us all I think. For every choice we make there are a million more we do not. And we can spend our lives, if we’re not careful, regretting those paths.

What does it mean to submit now, today to the circumstances of my life?

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