On a hill above a fishing village stood an old oak tree that had, by every account, stopped growing decades ago. The villagers below sometimes joked that it was simply waiting to fall, the way old things are expected to.
Every morning before sunrise, a retired fisherman named Caspar climbed the hill to stand beside it and push against its trunk with both hands, as hard as he could, for as long as his strength lasted, which these days was not very long at all.
A boy named Niko, walking up to fly his kite one such morning, found this baffling. "Why do you push the tree?" he asked. "It's not going anywhere."
"I'm not trying to move it," Caspar said, breathing hard, his hands flat against the old bark. "I'm checking whether I still can."
"Can what? Push a tree?"
"Push anything," said Caspar. "Push against the world and have the world push back. That's the whole trick of being alive, Niko. The day I push and nothing in me pushes back is the day I'll know something's gone quiet that shouldn't have."
Niko watched him for a while, this old man straining against a tree that didn't care one way or the other whether he succeeded, and found it strange that anyone would choose a contest they could never actually win.
"You'll never move it," Niko said. "Not even when you were young, probably."
"No," Caspar agreed. "And that's exactly why it's the right tree to push against. If I could move it, the whole exercise would be over in a week, and then what would I have to get up for?"
The wind came up off the water as it always did that hour, bending the tree's highest branches, and Caspar straightened slowly, rubbing his shoulder, satisfied in a way that had nothing to do with winning.
He came back the next morning. And the one after that. The tree never moved an inch, the village never stopped finding it a little strange, and Caspar never once explained himself any further than he already had — because some men don't push against trees to win. They push to prove, quietly, to no one but themselves, that there's still a man in there worth the pushing.
