In a beech wood in the morning, the light comes in from the side. It slips between the trunks as if through the columns of a nave, turning the highest leaves green while the ground is still in shadow, covered in a thick layer of copper-coloured leaves. The beeches stand straight, grey and smooth. They rise for many metres without a single branch, then open overhead into a canopy that sifts the sky. There is no marked path. Only the space between one tree and the next.
The first thing that changes as you walk in is scale. The trunks climb out of your field of vision and vanish above. The light that reaches the ground has passed through layer after layer of leaves, each one softening it a little more. The branches moving now were moving before you arrived. The roots reach down into soil built up over centuries of fallen leaves, one year on top of the last.
We have walked into the middle of something that takes no interest whatever in our arrival. That is no small thing.
Indifferent
Some places seem entirely indifferent to our presence. Not hostile: indifferent. They do not ask who we are, what we have achieved or what we hope to become. They do not reward our ambitions or console us for our failures. They simply exist, quietly and completely, as they did before we came and as they will after we have gone.
Most of the places we live in, by contrast, are built around us. Homes, offices and shops respond to our presence, anticipate our needs and give us constant feedback on how we are doing. Even the nature we visit most often has usually been adapted to receive us: waymarked paths, benches, signs with walking times. That is convenient, and rightly so. But it has a side effect: we are always at the centre of the picture.
An old forest turns that perspective around. It does not perform and it does not wait. It was not put there for us. And precisely because of that, once inside, you feel an unusual relief: for once, you are not the point.
Deep time
There is a name for the scale of time some things belong to. The American writer John McPhee coined it in 1981, in a book about the geology of the American West: deep time. It is the time of mountains rising and wearing away, of seas advancing and retreating, of rock slowly folding. Time so long that the human mind cannot picture it, only calculate it.
The idea itself is older. In 1788 the Scottish naturalist James Hutton, studying the rock strata of his native Scotland, reached a conclusion that sounded almost scandalous at the time: the Earth was not a few thousand years old but immensely ancient, shaped by slow cycles of erosion and deposition. He ended his essay with a line that became famous: we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
A forest is not as old as rock. But it carries something of that time within it. A beech can live for three or four centuries. The soil beneath it is the work of millennia. And a beech wood left to itself follows a rhythm in which a human generation is barely a moment. To walk into one is to live, for an hour, on a timescale that is not ours.
Looking up
What happens inside us when we stand before something so large? In 2015 a team of psychologists led by Paul Piff of the University of California, Irvine, set out to measure it. On the Berkeley campus there is a grove of Tasmanian blue gums more than sixty metres tall. The researchers asked one group of students to look up at the trees for a minute. They asked another group to spend the same minute looking at a tall building nearby.
Then a researcher approached with a questionnaire and, as if by accident, dropped a handful of pens. The students who had been looking at the trees picked up more of them. In the questionnaires they also reported feeling less entitled and holding themselves to higher ethical standards. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is one of the best known on the emotion psychologists call awe.
The authors’ explanation is simple: in the presence of something far bigger than ourselves, the self shrinks. Not in the sense of feeling humiliated, but of feeling part of something. The worries that a moment ago filled the whole stage fall back into place. And when the self takes up less room, there is more left over for other people.
The insight is not new. In 1802 the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand argued, in The Genius of Christianity, that Gothic cathedrals had been born in imitation of forests: pillars like trunks, vaults like interlaced branches, coloured light like the light that falls through leaves. The forests, he wrote, were the first temples. Whether or not he was right as a historian, he had grasped something true about how it feels to stand beneath tall trees.
A forest close to home
Anyone living in Ticino can find a wood of this kind half an hour’s drive from Locarno. In the Vallemaggia, above the village of Lodano, a side valley opens up, covered in beech forest. In 2010 the Lodano patriziato, the local community of landholders, decided to leave most of it to itself and turn it into a forest reserve: no felling, no intervention, the wood free to grow, age, fall and grow again in its own time. In the years that followed, the neighbouring valleys of Busai and Soladino were added.
On 28 July 2021 UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee added these beech woods, together with those of the Bettlachstock in the canton of Solothurn, to the Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe. It is a site spread across eighteen countries, created to protect what remains of the great beech forests that spread across much of the continent after the last Ice Age.
What makes these woods special is not their beauty. There are more spectacular ones. It is the fact that nobody makes decisions on the forest’s behalf. A fallen tree stays where it fell and becomes home to fungi, insects and moss. A gap in the canopy is filled, sooner or later, by a young beech that has been waiting for the light. This is a place that has not been arranged for visitors. Which is why, walking through it, you feel like a guest rather than a customer.
Capital and interest
Laws, too, can sometimes think on the scale of a forest. In 1868 a series of floods devastated the Swiss Alpine valleys and killed more than fifty people. One cause was plain to see: decades of clearing had left the slopes unprotected. Eight years later, on 24 March 1876, the Confederation passed its first federal forestry law.
The principle behind it had an almost peasant simplicity: each generation should inherit a forest as productive as the one the previous generation received. You may cut what grows back, the interest, but the capital must stay intact. At first the rule applied only to the mountains. In 1902 it was extended to the whole country, with a ban on reducing the forest area. To this day, anyone who clears woodland in Switzerland must replace it by planting elsewhere, and about a third of the country is covered by trees.
There is something moving about a law written for grandchildren none of its authors would ever meet. It follows the logic of the forest itself: working on a scale longer than one’s own life, and accepting that the best of the harvest will go to someone else.
Proportion
In a forest, time also moves differently. Not more slowly, exactly, but without the particular urgency that structures most of our days.
The urgency of modern life comes largely from responsiveness: the sense that something is always waiting for a reply, that our attention is always owed somewhere else. A forest makes no such claim. The wind in the canopy does not ask to be acknowledged. The light at a certain hour is not waiting for a comment. These things simply happen, as they always have, with no expectation of us at all.
What follows takes a little while to arrive, because the habits of responsiveness do not let go at once. But at some point there comes something close to the experience of existing without obligation. And with it, almost without noticing, the things we brought with us return to their proper size. The deadline is still a deadline, the problem still a problem. But they no longer fill the whole horizon. The forest was here before the question we are carrying, and it will be here after we have answered it, or forgotten it.
A different scale
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve: energy, attention, clarity. Among the things worth preserving is one we rarely mention: a sense of proportion. Lose it and you work badly, however hard you work. Every problem looks like the worst, every delay like a disaster, every decision like the final one.
A few simple choices follow. The first: spend time, now and then, with something larger than yourself. An old forest, a mountain, the sea in winter, a starry sky far from any lights. It need not be a journey: often an hour’s walk from your front door is enough. The second: go without an aim. Not to exercise, not to take photographs, not to come back more productive. The forest restores proportion precisely because we ask nothing of it. The third: look up. It sounds trivial, but the Berkeley experiment suggests that sixty seconds spent gazing at something immense is enough to see everything else with different eyes.
And a fourth, the most useful on the way home: bring back the scale, not the answers. The forest solves nothing. But someone who returns from a beech wood with a truer sense of how big things really are often makes better, calmer decisions than someone who spent the same hour hunting for a solution in front of a screen.
After us
When we leave, the forest stays exactly as it was. Our visit has changed nothing. The trees that were reaching for the light when we arrived are reaching still. The silence between one sound and the next, which is not really silence but the absence of demands, carries on without us.
We have taken nothing away except, perhaps, a slightly different sense of the scale of things. That may be enough. What a forest offers is not recovery in any strategic sense: it is not designed to make us more efficient or more resilient. It exists on a scale and over a span of time that make our own scale and our own span feel, for a moment, the right size.
And sometimes that is exactly what we need. Not answers, but proportion. Not silence, but the company of something that existed long before our questions began, and will go on existing once we have forgotten them.
