A while back, a teacher at my university told my class this true anecdote that he'd heard on the radio. The story went like this:
The Ancient TreeBack in the 60s, there was a research student who had travelled up north to a desolate wilderness to do research on trees. For his research, he needed an age sample from a specific type of tree. This could be found by extracting a bar of core wood from the trunk, but he had to wait for the drill to be shipped in, and things took a very long time to be transported into the desolate wilderness (months).
When the drill finally arrived, the student immediately set to work. He found a random tree sample and began to drill - but unfortunately for him, the drill snapped. At this point, unless he found a different solution, his whole summer would be wasted. Instead of waiting around for a new drill, he and his assistant decided that they would simply saw down a tree and find its age that way - this was not an endangered species, no harm would be done.
So the next day, they grabbed their manual saw, picked a tree at random, and began to saw away. It took several hours, since it was a very hefty tree.
But now the man had what he needed. Taking the trunk to his quarters, he started counting the tree rings the next morning (the number of rings in a tree trunk, tells you how many years old the tree is). It was a long process. 100, 200, 300, 400... there were many rings, but the young man pushed on. 500, 700, 1000... he went for a lunch break, there were just so many rings to count. 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000... at this point he started to feel a clenching in his stomache, but he continued. 3500, 4000, 4500.... after a long, long day (maybe days), the student was able to put the final count at almost 5000 years of age.
That's very old for any tree. In fact, as the student learned to his dismay, that was the oldest tree that had ever been discovered to that date. And not only was it the oldest tree, but it was the oldest living organism that had ever been discovered.
And he had cut it down.
***************************************The Gurmat PerspectveMe and my class all laughed when we heard this story, but it probably would have seemed like an enormous misfortune for the research student. Once green activists heard about this, the story was all over the news, and the poor man faced enormous backlash. Later on, this came back to haunt him and he even lost his career. All because of a totally unpredictable combination of factors that were really not his fault.
But the first thing I thought of after I got over the sadly comical irony of the story was that it was so amazing that Guru Sahib had just released this jeev from its ancient bondage. Vismaad! Something that seemed like pure accident was a perfect part of Guru Sahib's game of benevolence. The tree had been sitting through the last five thousand years, waiting for its karams to be exhausted and its sentence to finish, until Guru Sahib decided to do kirpa. The environmental activists that were in a rage thought that a great injustice had occured; how could they know about Guru Sahib's justice?
Vaheguru's nature is of kindness. Everything that Vaheguru does is perfectly good and wonderful. Gurbani tells us this over and over, and we must train our minds to have no doubt at all in this truth. Often in life, things happen that throw our lives in a direction we never desired. Unexpected accidents, losses, fights, deaths... they fill our existence till the day we die. Things that seem tragic, make us sad because we cannot see the good in them. But, we don't need to - we just have to have complete sharda: "
Jo tum karahu soee bhal hamarai... Whatever you do, I know that it is good."
May Guru Sahib bless insects like myself with this everlasting understanding.
ਸਤਿਗੁਰਬਚਨਕਮਾਵਣੇਸਚਾਏਹੁਵੀਚਾਰੁ॥
