Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
The Last Tree in the desert
You can move to the middle of the desert if you want - Trouble will find you -- YNOT!
There were two kinds of people in this world.
Those who go looking for trouble and those who stayed home and waited for trouble to find them.
When I was a kid, especially around Cubans, I would sometimes hear the expression, “La última Coca-Cola del desierto.” The last Coca-Cola in the desert.
It was a way of saying somebody thought they were pretty damn special. The one and only. The rare item. The center of the universe.
Well, this is not a story about the last Coca-Cola in the desert. This is the story about the Tree of Ténéré.
It is about something even rarer. The last tree. Or close enough.
Out in the Ténéré region of the Sahara, in Niger, there once stood a lone acacia tree.
The nearest other tree was said to be roughly 250 miles away.
Two hundred and fifty miles. That is isolation on a scale most of us cannot really comprehend.
No neighbors. No traffic. No lawn service. No zoning board. No idiot backing into your mailbox. Just sand.
And one tree.
The tree was around 300 years old and had somehow managed to survive one of the harshest places on Earth. Its roots reportedly reached more than 100 feet down toward underground water.
Caravans used it as a landmark. Travelers navigated by it.
It was important enough that maps marked its location.
Not the forest. Not an oasis. The tree.
For centuries it survived heat, drought, sandstorms, desertification, animals and everything else nature could throw at it.
If ever there was something that had successfully hidden from the world, this tree had done it.
In 1973, a truck driver somehow managed to drive directly into it.
The driver was reportedly drunk, although I am not sure that makes the story any more believable. Maybe less.
You have hundreds of miles of empty Sahara in every direction.
There is one tree.
One. And you hit it.
That takes a special kind of destiny.
Apparently the tree had even survived an earlier vehicle collision years before.
Think about that.
Three hundred years surviving the Sahara, and automobiles found it twice.
People spend their lives trying to avoid trouble.
They move away. They save money. They lock doors. They buy insurance.
They leave bad neighborhoods. They avoid bad people. They make plans.
They do everything right.
And sometimes trouble still crosses 250 miles of empty desert and drives straight into them.
For better or worse, life has a strange way of finding you .
Opportunity does too. So does love. So does disaster. So does luck.
You can hide from people.
You can hide from governments.
You can hide from your relatives.
Apparently you can even hide in the Sahara.
But you cannot always hide from destiny.
After the Tree of Ténéré was destroyed, its remains were taken to the National Museum in Niamey.
A metal monument was placed where the tree once stood.
And the monument should probably say something like, “Three hundred years alone in the desert, and the son of a bitch still couldn’t stay out of traffic.”
And that may be the lesson.
There is no place so remote, no plan so perfect, and no life so carefully arranged that fate cannot occasionally find the one damn tree in 250 miles of desert.
Sometimes trouble comes looking for you.
Sometimes fortune does too.
The trick is not believing you can hide forever. The trick is being ready when it arrives.
Because it will come… what am I talking about… Life will tell you one day.
