Life’s absurdities never cease to amaze me. While looking at a rather sturdy tree on my way to class last week I started to think of the tree’s existence and its place in everyone’s objective reality. The fundamental question here was whether the tree was real because we were looking at it and making that so, or were we looking at it because it was indeed real?

Even though I didn’t have much time to gaze at the tree, the question followed me throughout the day. I attacked the question from diff erent philosophical perspectives.

From a skeptical point of view, I’m the only one who saw the skinny, leafless, sturdy and bizarre tree in the corner of campus. The only way the tree was there is because I perceived it as such. Nothing more. Everyone else saw what he or she thought they saw.

After that, I tried Martin Heidegger’s approach in where the only thing I was sure about was the fact that everyone else, myself included, were there; the tree was irrelevant to that fact. For a moment I thought I had lost my mind again; it seems to happen quite often on long walks to class. “I should’ve drunk my carrot juice earlier that morning,” I thought to myself. Though my carrot juice had nothing to do with anything, I continued thinking about the tree.

I went through various modes of thinking until I realized I couldn’t get a correct answer. This was because the tree and everyone else were stuck in the same existence. To say that it was – as fact- still there would be a fallacy and the same as to say that it wasn’t there. The people walking to class and the lonely tree were both impermanent things existing momentarily at the same time.

In other words, the tree and I were there when I looked at it but I can’t say much after seeing it because I simply don’t know for a fact that it’s still there. That is appropriately classifi ed as an educated assumption.

However, this experience with the tree gave me a deeper understanding of our existence. Apart from the perplexing thoughts, just having the freedom to question and think that way reminded me of the many mysteries of our brains and life at large. We always want to know and we always ask why at every turn. The lesson for that day: it’s OK not to know.

In short, life isn’t always about acquiring knowledge. We should take the time to look around in awe and realize we have, at best, 100 years to fully experience the wonder of this planet and our existence.

Look at a tree and smile, because you truly have no concrete idea of what’s really going on no matter how well you might delude yourself.

Ignorance, in this specific existential context, is OK and perhaps even wise.