In Berlin, I live in Appartment that is framed by trees from the outside. In my fascination with space and time, I am beginning to think of these trees as a sprawling extension of my space. When I go out the balcony or look through the windows of my kitchen, they expand my horizon. Depending on the day, I would look at them intently. In the winter they lack their usual lustre. Barebones, so to speak, their branches are devoid of leaves. Yet, it is inconceivable to imagine them inert. As the season give way to spring, they get ready to grow leaves. This is a cycle I have witnessed for more than six years. Admittedly, I have been mostly oblivious to the depth of these occurrences. Over time, they have become a measure of my ever-shifting, sifting outlook on life. 

The area is also quiet most of the day. At night, the silence is sacred. I find myself spending more time indoors. Staying indoors is often frowned upon. Some see it as a sign of self-inflicted boredom or a result of loneliness. Yes, it could be. Yet, underneath every turmoil is always a place of calmness synonymous to a sacred trove. A place where the innermost part of one’s being finds quietness. This quietness is like clear waters. It stretches to the boundaries of the unknown. 

There is so much knowledge and wisdom embedded in the unknown. Thus, when one says, “I do not know” it does not always mean one is not wise. Quite the contrary. The unknown is a headroom. The ever sprawling horizon. It is an ordered hierarchy that discreetly and patiently hold the missing pieces of our logic, waiting for us to weave our way to it.

Beyond logic lies truth.

Truth isn’t plural as, today, we are led to believe. It can only be so if truth is always legible, static and does not account for the unknown. 

Lately, I have come to the realisation that the ultimate purpose of life is to learn. This is the collective purpose out of which we extrapolate individual destinies, and by which we appraise the specific patterns of our respective fate. Either way, life is learning in the most continuous sense of the word.

If existence is a struggle, the survival of the fittest, the transcendence of misfortune, a never-ending damage control, then what are we learning? 

We’ve called it the pursuit of happiness. Some call it freedom. These are words that hold a promise driven by an insistent force called hope. Today, this force has become ever more fragile for many of us in the world. Just as we’ve learned to tame fire and multiply the force of atoms, we’ve learned to intervene and manipulate the currents of hope-energy. Where it is not stifled, it is made into a transactional commodity. Like a creature chasing its tail, we chase our happiness, without which life is but a nest too hollow to hold eggs. 

Space and time, as with truth, is not plural but continuous. Boundaries are only soft markers that allow for gaps of respite. When they are made into walls, only fear is reinforced, not our safety. The architecture of our infrastructures are infused with so much awareness of fear that it is impossible not to be immersed in it. Yet, because everything exists and co-exists in space and time, fear should never have been the delineator of our subjectivity.

How can anything exist if it does not correlate with something else? The Igbo’s say, “where one thing stands, something else stands beside it”. This is the fundamental dynamics of life. 

The borders of nations we have today, and for which lives are subdued and annihilated, are a delineation of space and time. To make a static identity, such a delineation is necessary. Only in the linearity of a confining boundary can an identity which fears what is beyond it relevant. 

Borders are a patchwork invention regardless of how much it is exalted as markers of “home” land. Yes, humans have always needed a “culture area” to nurture and give unique forms to the knowledge extracted from the dynamics of life. That’s the upside to boundaries. To nurture something to life is the task of evolution. But it seems that the insurmountable notion of infinity is always lost on us. Nothing is permanent because with permanence, there would be nothing. That is to say, we kill ourselves and destroy our ecosystem only to make a mark in a patch of time of which no one can ascertain its significance in the scale of an ever-expanding infinite. 

As I watched the tree in front of my balcony today, I wondered how long it must have been there. Most certainly older than many generations if not everyone alive today. One day, it might give way to an effort to expand the street or build a newer structure in the neighbourhood. It will not protest when the agents of the city council come to chop it down. It won’t utter a word. It wouldn’t need to prove that it is anything else other than a tree. It will give way, taking along with it all the stories it witnessed, the memories it shaped and the lives it healed by virtue of its presence — mine included. 

What are we learning?