Four days backpacking on the Appalachian trail, and all I remember is trees.

This wasn’t what I expected when some friends invited me to go with them on a weekend expedition through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I had mountains on my brain—it’s in the name of the park, for crying out loud! I imagined walking peak to peak along the spine of the mountains, going from view to breathtaking view.

Not so much.

The 28-mile section we hiked offered some majestic scenes, no doubt. But the vast majority of the hike took place under the canopy of an ancient boreal forest dating back to the last ice age. Look to the left? Trees. The right? More trees, arranged to suggest the mountain’s contour, but too thick to actually see through. Most days were foggy. It rained a lot.

All of which is to say that, if I wanted to enjoy the nature aspect of the hike, I needed to adjust my expectations. By the second day, I wasn’t just looking at the trees. I was enthralled. Red spruce and Fraser firs, yellow birch and cedars. Giant hemlock trees rising more than 100 feet into the air.

And those were just the living trees. Equally fascinating were the dead ones, struck by lightning or choked by beetles or blown over by violent winds. Some were felled when the soil beneath them gave way, exposing tangles of roots 12-feet across, sometimes still with enough connection to keep the tree alive despite its horizontal orientation. We saw massive trunks that feel more than half a century ago, covered with moss but still bearing witness to a life now ended.

At first, when I encountered a particularly interesting tree, I tried to imagine its story. But I gave up on that pretty quickly. How do you imagine a life of 400 years, in some cases? The only way I could do so was by comparing it to human history: this tree was alive during the Civil War, that one predates Cotton Mather, and so forth. But to imagine how that history played out for the tree itself is beyond my comprehension.

Much more so the forest.

The Southern Appalachia spruce-fir forest dates back to the last ice age, at least 12,000 years ago. In some places, it has existed in much the same form for 18,000 years. Individual trees have come and gone. Species have flourished and faded with time and insects and human intervention. But these things happen over centuries, not moments. And through it all, the forest endures. I find that both comforting and terrifying.

No sooner had I returned from my 92-hour break from civilization than someone shot Charlie Kirk and the internet lost its mind. Angst, justification, sorrow, righteous indifference all thrown into a stew pot, with hypocrisy as the roux.

But that’s just one story. War crimes in Gaza, corruption in the White House, uncertainty in the economy, and a thousand others that add up in a single inevitable conclusion: the world is burning, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Fair enough. I won’t deny you your lament. But consider another perspective.

People are like the forest. They don’t change all that much, really. Social structures come and go. Governments rise and fall. Technology improves our lives until it destroys them. God knows what AI will bring in the end.

But these are all conditions, not the forest itself. For our entire existence, humans have been tribal, selfish, panicky, and cruel. We have also been capable of incredible love, compassion, invention, and adaptation. The way we work and speak is different now than it was 500 years ago, true. But it would be hard to argue that we have somehow evolved spiritually or morally. From the insignia of Caesar to the crest of the Machiavellis to the red-white-and-blue elephant logo, we have been a species that craves power and worships tyrants. Whatever change has happened to the humanity forest over time has been small and slow and rarely permanent.

Not so for individual humans, or at least not so to the same degree. A person can change. A person should change. We look on those who don’t as somehow stunted, certainly lacking imagination and probably short on courage. A good person, we believe, needs to mature over time. We—in most of the world, if not the United States—count on our elders to be caring and compassionate and wise in a manner they could not have been in their younger years. Their growth may be so slow as to be imperceptible by most people around them, but over time it becomes evident. And when they die, their legacy continues to be visible for decades.

The difference, of course, is rate of change.

In another life, when I taught a class on pop culture and theology, I would quote Andy Crouch’s notion that any swift cultural change will inevitably be negative. Things can be torn town quickly. It takes much longer to build. A forest fire can knock out what took centuries to develop. Renewal might take centuries more.

Disasters, however, are beyond my control, as is the fate of the larger human project. I am not the forest. I am a tree. All I can do is grow.

But I can do that. I was made to do it.