What is worse than seeing the same tree twice in a jungle?

It is often said that if you see the same tree twice in a jungle it means you are lost. In this article, I am going to write my thoughts about something that could be worse than seeing the same tree twice.

An individual usually lives for around eighty years. During his or her lifetime, the number of incidents they face, the number of people they meet are enormous. They also  learn countless things from their elders, books and schools.

But here is the catch, are all those incidents they face and the individuals they meet completely different from each other?

Have you met different people who somehow share the same qualities who have the same hobby, the same group of friends and the same way of thinking? Have you ever noticed that some different incidents had the same cause and sometimes the same result?  Have you ever felt like that some story you heard from your father or a book happened in real life? I have and I am sure many people have noticed that.

Does that mean you are seeing the same tree twice in the jungle?

My answer is yes. But does it mean that you are lost? As I see it, we may be on the wrong path but we are not necessarily lost. The important question is whether you recognize that it’s the same tree that you are seeing again and again.

Just imagine, if you don’t recognize it. What would you do?

You would keep walking. Eventually you would complete the same loop and arrive at the same tree again but you don’t recognize it again and keep walking thinking that you are making progress. In a dense jungle, recognizing the same tree may not be as easy as it sounds. Maybe that’s why our ancestors marked trees when they traveled through forests.

So now you have the answer to my earlier question. Seeing the same tree twice but not recognizing it is the same tree is much more worse than seeing it twice. You only can change your course, stay where you are and save your energy or ask for help if you recognize it.

Every day, we experience new incidents and meet new people. They may appear completely different from anything that we have encountered before but many of them have patterns that we have already experienced, heard about from our elders or learned from books and stories.

So, what do we need to have to recognize these patterns? First, we need to know the patterns. When we live our everyday life, we should pay attention to the qualities of the people around us and what they normally do, the causes of the incidents happen around us and what results they lead to.

As I think the fastest way to learn these patterns is to learn history, listen to the wise elders and read the books. If you have noticed that many different stories from very different sources sometimes have very similar stories. This might happen also because of the repeating patterns of incidents and the people.

 The second thing we need to have is paying attention to the surroundings. If you only see an incident happening but doesn’t think about its causes, it will not make you use the patterns you have already learned. So, paying attention to the early clues is important for this to work. Also, I think learning patterns will also help us identify these early clues as well.

However, this does not mean that we should solely depend on the learned patterns and history because it is not always correct, but we should use this knowledge as a warning to mark our boundaries, take early actions and stay alerted, once we pay attention, we would be able to recognize if something is deviating from the known pattern as well.

Here is an interesting fact, the human brain is also wired to learn patterns, more interestingly it has learned many patterns throughout the whole evolution of the mankind. These patterns help you survive from life-threatening situations and make better decisions easily when the decision space is so large that it takes a huge amount of time to make a correct decision solely by thinking. Also paying attention to what brain thinks in certain situations might help us identify the patterns our own brain thinks and help us better, to control what we think and feel.

Maybe we cannot avoid seeing the same trees in life. We will meet people who remind us of people we have known before. History will sometimes seem strangely familiar.

But seeing the same tree again does not necessarily mean that we are lost. In fact, recognizing it might be exactly what prevents us from becoming lost.

So keep looking around while you walk. If you notice a familiar tree, wait for a moment and ask yourself:

Have I been here before...?