Interdependence

The English Oak tree can live for over 400 years.
Five or six times our lifetime – if we are lucky!
Think of the big trees you see in parks today.
Your grandmother’s great grandmother’s great grandmother might have seen them as saplings. Her children and their children could have climbed them.
Your great grandparents might have carved their initials into their trunks.
A lot happens during the life of an Oak tree. All this begins with an acorn, just 2 cm high.

No acorn, no oak tree.
No oak tree, no acorns.
Everything is connected.

So it is with people. Without your grandparents, your great grandparents, and their ancestors, the complex arrangement of genetic information that makes you who you are would never have come about.
You wouldn’t be here.

There are many hundreds of people you have never met who have affected your life today. In some way, some small but significant way, you are connected to those people, like leaves on opposite sides of an enormous oak tree.

Look at the leaves on our tree. Some of them are red. On them you can read about some of those strangers who have changed your life, perhaps without you realising. Take a moment to read about them. 

Perhaps there are other people you can think of who have changed your life in some way – members of  your family, people you admire, your heroes, those who have inspired you. Take a moment to write their names on a leaf and add them to the tree. As you do so, remember that every person who has ever lived belongs to the family tree of humanity – and so do you.