Unusually usual

Toady, like any other day, I went for a walk with one my friends in the evening. The walk started off like any other day. The track walks (We don't run you see. So the track also walks) for the most part around the apartment complexes in our colony, cutting through it at only two places, leaving two islands of apartment complexes outside its circumference. It has a well maintained lawn on both its sides, studded with majestic trees planted at various locations. The usual way to go about the walk is that I first call my friend who lives in a different apartment and make sure he is ready to walk. And then I start off from my house and walk clockwise along the pavement till I reach halfway, where this friend's apartment is and wait till he joins me. Then we go about tracing two to three complete perimeters. It used to be 6 to 8 before, but I have reduced it now as I have started seeing some effects of my walk on one of my knees. The total distance of three perimeters would be 2 miles.

So, today it started off as usual. It however did not take long for this walk to be different from the ones that I had taken before. I saw a tree that had been chopped down. A small portion of its trunk was still with mother earth, a mother holding her dead mutiliated child. The rest of the tree was neatly chopped off into smaller cylinders and lay around it. I was instantly disturbed. It is not that I have never heard of trees being cut down before. But to be frank, i do not like the idea of seeing a chopped off tree like this. Having grown up hearing how afforestation is important, this chopping of a tree looked criminal to me. And also, plants are life after all. Never mind I eat of their produce; it still feels awkward to see a dead tree.

This of course, did not stop my walk. I continued my walk, having noted one distinctive feature of the tree. Something I noted for the first time. The concentric rings that were visible in bare cross section of one of the trunk pieces. I have studied in school that trees add one such concentric ring every year and counting the number of concentric rings woiuld tell us the age of that tree. With these thoughts I continued my walk meeting my friend at his apartment entrance, but not before I noticed another tree, older than the first, also dead due to human intervention in their life. We continued our walk. My friend had not seen the two trees yet and thankfully there were no more chopped trees on our way. However, I did tell him about the chopped trees and we discussed and resolved to find out the ages of the two trees in our next round.

Our discussion about the chopped trees led to another unexpected consequence. We started to notice the vegetation around our colony. Something that we have never done before. And we were amazed how we never stop by to see what trees are around us. How we as normal humans, engaged in their day to day activities, do not spend enough time understanding our surroundings. It was only an inadequate consolation to us that all these "natural" surroundings that we have is after are "artificial", in that they are creations of some human agency that decided to plant them there.

My friend for the first time noticed that there were two types of trees we had in our colony. I had noticed it before, but did not want to spoil the taste of this accidental discovery in my friend's mind. So, I shook my head with a quick smile across my lips. He called one of these tree types the "fir". I have vaguely heard this name before, but i was not sure if that was the correct name for the tree. but does it really matter? We decided that the other tree was the maple tree.
Thus, we went on and eventually completed the three rounds, discussing at various times about why there were no mosquitoes in the place where we live and how Americans love nature more than us Indians (I didn't agree to this view of his, which was based on a grossy incorrect ground that they grow lawns all around). We also found the age of those two prematurely expired trees: they were roughly 27 and 37 years old: rough because the rings were difficult to distinguish closer to the periphery. I left the track and was back home with this thought: How this unusually horrible habit of neglecting to note what is around me, has become what I categorize as "usual".