When was the last time you climbed a tree?
If the answer is more than a few months ago, then you need to read this. It’s a matter of utmost importance. Your courage and whimsy depend on it.
Climbing trees is medicine for your mental health. If you ever feel sad, overwhelmed, burnt out, depressed, anxious, confused—climb a tree. It’s that simple. Climbing trees scratches an evolutionary itch embedded deep in our primate DNA, older by millions of years than our lives on the ground. You don’t need a daily dose—just one climb a month provides longer-lasting benefits than any prescription drug I’ve tried.
So many of our modern mental health struggles stem from a mismatch between what our bodies evolved to desire and what we actually spend our time doing. There’s a tension between our ancient genes and the rapidly evolving cultural memes we must now adapt to. Our social structures—beautiful and empowering as they can be—oversatisfy some of our needs while starving others. We’re left feeling like something’s missing. Luckily, memes are incredibly adaptable; I write this column so we can learn anew how to climb trees.
Treeclimbing empowers us with a primal sense of competence. Like every living thing, we need to feel capable of navigating our physical environment—able to escape predators into a safe tree, nourish ourselves by finding tasty fruit, and move through the world with confidence, strength, and a sense of belonging. Trees were the first home we adapted to move through, and when you climb into an easy tree, ancestral memories will instantly flood your muscles. Your hands and feet will know what to do. You’ll pull yourself up, higher and higher, four-limbed and alive.
Good starter trees around Harvard Yard include the Emerson Tree (subject of my First Treetise, “The Best Tree in Harvard Yard,” which launched this column on Harvard tree-climbing in 2018), the Dawn Redwoods by Robinson Hall (subject of my Fifth Treetise, “Dawn Redwoods,” this past fall), and the lovely tree in the center of Canaday courtyard. One of my favorite evenings this fall featured all three; the security guard who’d asked me to get down from the first couldn’t see me in the leaves of the next. Or maybe, at least, he pretended. Safe in the tree, surrounded by flaming fall leaves, listening to the dialogue between the wind and the branches, I thought and thought as evening deepened through blue and everything melted into one shadow. One good long think, high in a tree, can be the highlight of your week, more empowering than days in a gym or a library—and more cheerful, more simple.
Competence and courage grow from a healthy dose of danger. Treeclimbing is perfect: as long as you’re aware and present with your body and the tree, you will not fall. Just lock in. In all my years, I’ve never fallen out of a tree. Looking down from a high limb thrills you with a sense of trust in your own ability to carry yourself and defy gravity. This rising thrill engenders the courage necessary for climbing higher still.
We, who’ve grown up in an unprecedentedly safety-obsessed society, need the challenge of treeclimbing. I don’t want you to be safe; I want you to be skillful. Our whole lives, risk-averse systems have tamed most environments in advance of our arrival. We stay on the beaten paths. But climbing a tree, holding the weight of your own body aloft—this individualizes. You, alone, survive or die, a single self in a physical environment. There are no paths, peoples, signs. You adapt not to the merely human world, but to the world beneath and above it.
Treeclimbing is individualizing, yet it’s also a symbol of belonging. Before the campfire, the tree was where we were home together. The tree is the tribe. To be honest, I’ve always struggled with belonging at Harvard. First I was too young, then I was too old, and I pretty much ignored a decade’s worth of therapy debt the whole time. I think a lot of people here, at a school that lets us in just to show us thousands of magic locked doors, struggle with belonging. But when you’re perched in a tree, friends walk by. They chat. They smile in the spring sunlight, cross the green behind Sever, and swing themselves up into your tree. The tribe always comes home.
Trees teach us withness. Sitting on a branch, leaning into a living trunk, you feel you’re truly with that tree in a way you can’t be with bricks. You relate with a living thing. On some level, the tree knows you’re there. And on some level, you trust it, as family, to hold you. You’re both changing, both staying the same. You adapt, together. Maybe it’s good to be reminded of this. Maybe the whole world works more like this than we think.
In a tree, we are children again. Treeclimbing is an essential form of play; it taps into a native sense of simian whimsy. We’re all just kids climbing trees, exploring a new world together. Climbing with friends reactivates the inner layers of ourselves—like tree rings receiving water—three, six, nine years old again. In a tree, we are innocent, unabused, unlimited. No violence has ever touched our skins. We are free. We are the joy of the world seeing itself for the first time.
Climbing trees gives us perspective.
From a new angle, we see the world more clearly—often in ways we couldn’t have imagined from the ground. Even a low perch in a small tree can shift our understanding of a place we thought we knew. By zooming out from the physical world, we train a deeper cognitive muscle that lets us gain perspective on our ideas, perspective on ourselves.
When the camera pans out, rising above planet Earth, you see trees. An extraterrestrial observer might notice that trees seem to be the shape that the surface of the Earth likes to create as often as it can. For some reason, buried deep in the source-code architecture of the universe, trees are patterns that just make sense. Nature enjoys becoming trees. The world, like ourselves, evolves in branches—rivers threading toward the ocean, dendrites reaching across synapses from one neuron to the next, the fractal, fern-like burns on the skin of someone who survives a lightning strike.
I’d bet that the world of ideas is tree-shaped, too. Veritas over time, the branching disciplines, the trunk-like consiliences—it’s a tree of trees of trees. Reality is arborescent.
So take a walk, and climb a new tree. This summer, you’ll find all kinds—if you keep your eyes open. Even here, on Harvard’s campus, there are dozens of excellent climbable trees to discover. Harvard may not want you to climb (they prune the lower branches of most trees to make them inaccessible). But in the rare case a security guard tells you to come down, don’t worry—it’s chill, they’re just doing their job. You can climb down with a smile, obligingly, and laugh at how silly it is to tell a primate to get out of a tree for their own safety. Later, you can climb right back up.
These are our trees, and we should climb them. Harvard, hemmed in by a larger system based on a flawed notion of liability, should continue to unofficially look the other way; we must be free to take our own risks. But if the day comes when they must choose, I hope they protect our right to climb. I have nightmares of Harvard cutting the lower limbs off the Emerson Tree; this would be a tragic crime. The spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson doesn’t live in the brick hall that bears his name—it lives in the tree growing free beside it. Cut those branches, and Harvard cuts its own trunk. The true Harvard would fall.
But luckily, the trees are still here. We still have strength in our legs, scratches on our arms, and sap on our palms. We were born to climb.
Aidan Fitzsimons ’20-’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) will be in the Emerson Tree at 5 p.m. on May 15th.