Man Like a Tree

My wife is Korean, and she has this way of teasing me that always lands harder than she thinks. She calls me 잔망 (janmang), which is a Korean word for someone who's mischievous, playfully silly, always clowning around. And honestly, she's not wrong. I've always been reactive, excitable, quick to jump into whatever energy is in the room. I get distracted easily, I talk too much, and I've always worn my emotions on the outside.

Then she'll say it: "You should be more like a tree."

In Korean culture, there's an adage about the ideal man. A man like a tree is someone who doesn't sway with every wind. He grows slowly, steadily, rooted in place, strong enough to shelter the people around him. He's not cold or rigid, just unmoved by the things that don't matter so he can show up fully for the things that do.

I used to brush this off. That's not me, I'm the fun one. Trees are boring. But then I became a father, and I started to understand what she meant.

When Stillness Becomes Necessary

There's a moment that I think every new parent has, where you realize the chaos isn't going to stop. The sleep deprivation, the crying, the constant low-grade anxiety of keeping a tiny human alive. You can't outrun it and you can't out-energy it. You can only learn to be still inside of it.

I've meditated on and off for years, but I never really took it seriously. It was something I did when I remembered, more of a box to check than a real practice. Becoming a father changed that. Not overnight, but slowly, in the hard moments. Flynn is crying, I'm exhausted, I can feel the frustration rising up in my chest and I want to react to it, I want to snap or shut down or reach for my phone. But I'm learning to do something different. I'm learning to feel that negative emotion come up and not associate with it. To step back from it, watch it, and let it pass without it becoming who I am in that moment.

I'm still not good at it. I'm taking meditation seriously for maybe the first time in my life, and I can feel the difference it's making, but it is still very difficult. Some days I sit there and my mind won't stop. Some days Flynn cries and I lose my patience anyway. But there's something growing in those moments of practice, even the failed ones. A centre, a quiet place that, when I can find it, doesn't move when everything else does.

Growing the Tree

That centre is your consciousness and your will. It's the part of you that knows what's right before you react, the decision-maker that, when it acts, you feel it in your chest. Not anxiety or excitement, something quieter. Alignment.

You have to grow it deliberately, the way you'd water a real tree. Daily, without drama, trusting that the roots are going deeper even when you can't see the progress.

Meditation grows it, but so does any practice where you choose stillness over reaction. Pausing before you respond when someone pushes your buttons, sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to fix it, holding your position when the market or life is screaming at you to move. Every time you choose the harder silence over the easier reaction, the trunk gets a little thicker.

I've been building this tree-like nature into my life as a core principle. It's become one of the things I care most about developing, not just as a practice but as a way of being.

Being Strong Doesn't Mean Being Stiff

This is where I think people get it wrong. Being like a tree doesn't mean you stop laughing or being excitable or being yourself. Trees bend in storms. They lose their leaves in winter. They're alive, constantly growing, constantly adapting.

The difference is where the movement comes from. A reactive person moves because the world moves them. Something happens and they get pulled along like a leaf in the current. A centred person moves because they choose to. The storm hits, the branches sway, but the trunk holds and the roots go deeper.

I still laugh too loud. I still get excited about things. Inwu still teases me for it. But there's something underneath now that wasn't there before, a weight, a centre of gravity that lets me be playful on the surface because I know I'm solid underneath.

The Man My Son Will See

My son Flynn is almost ten months old. He doesn't know what a tree is yet, and he doesn't know about Korean adages or meditation or personal philosophy. But he watches me, and he watches everything.

What I want him to see, not when he's old enough to understand words but right now when he's old enough to feel energy, is a father who is present. Not reactive or scattered or reaching for distractions when things get hard, but rooted. Steady. Growing.

Inwu was right all along. I'm just finally learning how to listen.