Today, I had a stunning experience. I fought with an oak tree, An oak tree and lost. Now this is not your Sherwood Forest enormous oak. This was a small sapling, maybe 5 feet tall, and it was growing in my friend’s hedge, a low hedge. Maybe this hedge itself was only a foot and a half tall.

So he asked me to remove it. I was doing some gardening, pulling some weeds on his estate in Poland here. And so I thought to myself, this is going to be easy. So I pulled on the tree, and it wouldn’t come out. I’m not that weak.

I’m still pretty strong. So I thought I’ll go and get a tool. So I got a shovel, and I dug away at the roots of this oak, and it wouldn’t let go. And then the capper, I cracked the shovel. So the oak, at least for the time being, had won.

And I thought to myself, wow. This is a lot like life in a way, isn’t it? You have to know when you can’t proceed, when you failed at something, and this is not a loss of one’s life. This is just a setback for the moment. Because very much like, I think, Hegel in his zeitgeist, life is an enormous journey to the end, and I think we have to struggle on and try.

So what happens when I have this setback? Well, what I did is I took the dirt that I dug out, and I put it back around the tree and to show that I accepted that the tree had won for the time being at the very least. So I think I had to realize the moment that I had lost, and I felt a little bit disquieted, to be honest. You know? I felt as if I was not as strong as I should be.

All of those things play in your mind, I think. And then I realized, wait a moment. Like I said a moment ago, you have to sit back and reflect. Is the killing of this tree going to change your life? The removal of this tree going to change your life?

No. It was a task that I set out to do, and I failed. So now it is up to me to go forward and find a new task, which I did. I continued to pull weeds out of the garden, and I felt quite accomplished in that sense. So I guess in life, all of us have to, at times, reflect on where we are and where we’re going.

I’m sitting here, you know, in this beautiful environment, and I thought to myself, wow. So many of us claim that we’re depressed or I feel depressed or I feel upset. And I really think the solution to all of this is to take yourself into a natural environment, God willing, a farm or something like this, and get to work in a farm. Get your hands dirty. Feel your back burnt by the sun, the perspiration on your brow, as it said, and then reflect on your life.

Take time to reflect on your life. Leave the gadget at home unnecessary, and then you can work away. And you will find that, ultimately, you will be able to confront your Jungian shadow, as it’s called, your dark side. You will be able to think because you are self contained. You are a self contained nuclear bomb, if you will.

You just have to ignite yourself. You have to turn on the switch to make you the person that you want to be. And all around us, and I think I can say this with some experience, all around the stimuli, negative and positive, that we often respond to, especially if we don’t know or don’t feel that we have free will. But we do. We all have free will.

We all can do what we want to do in our lives, but it takes some time to reflect. It takes me realizing that I am my own teacher, of course, I always say this, and then jotting down in your notebook your thoughts and feelings. Right? Why am I here? What’s my mission?

I don’t know yet, but that’s okay. Write down what you think your mission could be, and where am I going when I leave here? Find peace in this magnificent life. And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is excellent, and critical thinking is great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.

The oak tree that beat me! This is often what occurs in life!