Life Through Leaves

I am sitting on a bench on my college campus. Beside me sat a leaf, before I put my english text book on top of it. I lift the textbook to find that the leaf has been crushed. It was an old leaf to begin with, and now it is even more wrinkled and crumpled. I take the leaf in my hand and throw it into the breeze. Unfortunately, the wind is not strong enough to have any effect on the motion of the falling particles, and most of them land directly onto my laptop. I blow them off, and am suddenly transfixed by the slight breeze that is noticeable not only by touch, but by sight as I gaze out into the grassy field in which the remains of the leaf have landed. It’s not the grass that I notice in motion, but once again leaves, this time at the top of a tree in the field. These leaves are very green and full of life. I focused in a bit more on this tree, and on this tree alone. The wind is blowing each leaf independently from every other leaf on the tree in a random, uncountable fury. All of the leaves have different paths of motion, each leaf with a different shape and most probably different sizes as well. It makes the entire tree seem like a very complicated structure, yet there lays order living amongst the chaos. Although each individual leaf moves independently, groups of these leaves all apart of larger branches seem to sway in sync with one another. Undoubtedly they are all being blown by the same waves of wind. Now, expanding my view to look at other trees surrounding the original one, I realize that even though they are all at different points in their swaying, each tree is being affected by the same wind! The waves of air pass through one tree and eventually hit another, so each tree must sway in similar patterns made by the wind. Each leaf is hit by a different brush of these waves, and each leaf moves in a different way, but each tree as a whole follows the pattern set by the trees in front of them. Even though each leaf moves independently from every other leaf, they are all connected by the same pattern, the same wind. The tree I am staring at follows both a random and systematic pattern, at the same time! The leaves are disorganized, but if you were to look at the whole tree, groups of leaves flow in the wind together, almost making the waves of the wind visible. If you take it a step further and expand your view to an even wider range by looking at multiple trees, you discover that each tree is following the same type of pattern as the wind flows through each one! The entire concept got me thinking… what if you could take it even further? What if one could analyze the exact position and motion of all of the trees on the planet all at once? Would we notice even larger patterns in the wind? Would we even begin to see loops or repeating patterns of motion in the motion of the trees if we were to look at the entire earth as a whole for a very long period of time? I thought about the concept and realized something else. If we were to zoom out very far, say in a location like a forest, (and by this I mean zooming out so that one could see every tree in said forest) it would look as if each individual TREE would represent the LEAVES of the entire forest! The trees from our gaze this far out in the sky would look similar to our viewpoint of the leaves on the trees from our normal perspective. Each tree becomes a leaf, and each forest becomes a tree. Every tree would be swaying in a different way due to each one being hit by a different gust of wind, each tree moving in what is now also a random uncertainty, much less organized than from a grounded perspective. When thinking about the ACTUAL leaves on the trees from so high up, it really made me realize how much more complicated things can look from different perspectives. Each tree really is moving in as complicated a pattern as each leaf on each tree. It makes the simplest things in life seem so much more confusing, so much deeper. Now, coming back to reality, I looked down at the leaf I had crumpled into pieces. If I were to look at a leaf as if I were looking at it from very high in the air, wouldn’t that mean that each leaf could be broken down into something that moves in an even more complicated motion, just like we broke down the whole forest? How confusing would it be to look at something that moved in an even more complicated pattern than all of the leaves in the world from a very high perspective, something even smaller and in even greater numbers? It’s a good representation of the universe as a whole. Even something as massive as an entire forest, swaying in the wind in all of its mighty glory would have nothing without the sails that carry it through the wind. Without the tiny, minuscule leaves of the forest, the forest would not be in motion at all. Even the smallest of ideas can have a huge effect on the universe as a whole. No matter how high we were to go, even if we were to look at the swaying of entire galaxies, entire universes even, all of the motion comes back down to the leaves. No matter how large or complicated anything gets, it always comes back to its most basic form, always reverts back to its roots. The leaves on the trees connect to the branches, which attach to the trunk, which grabs onto the ground and stretches out its roots. These roots even have roots themselves. The roots grew out of a seed or an acorn, and reached into the ground in order to find water. The water itself is made up of three tiny atoms, two hydrogen ones and a single oxygen. These atoms can be broken down into particles, simple protons and neutrons. These particles can then be broken down EVEN further with today’s science into what we call quarks, with each individual particle containing three of these. Who knows? Maybe one day we will discover that each quark can be broken down even further, perhaps into millions of energy-like, constantly bending and twisting strings described in String Theory? As I sit here, on this bench, looking at the crumpled leaf at my feet, I thought about how complicated the universe can really be when looked at from a large scale, trying to possibly concieve how many strings there must be in the universe, all swaying independently from one another in a pattern so random, and so indescribable that it would be impossible to fully understand, probably possible to even imagine. With all of this going through my head, my concentration is broken by a passing motorcycle, and all I could think of was how important the little things are. Every leaf has its own purpose; every leaf is a part of something bigger. Why shouldn’t humans be the same way?