Fable of the Crooked Tree (Chapter Three)
“Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity, to seizure everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?”
Once upon a time, in a forest at the river's edge, growing among the magnificent straight trees, was a crooked one. Its trunk was small, its limbs were sparse and twisted. Languishing in the shadows of massive trunks and branches that stretch to the sky, the crooked tree wondered, why am I not tall and straight with branches that reach for the sky? It yearned to be like the other trees, but it could neither stand tall nor straighten its limbs no matter how much it tried.
One beautiful spring morning, the forest came alive with animals awakening from their long winter slumber. The crooked tree wanted nothing more than for the forest animals to take refuge in its shade. But the animals would scurry past and think to themselves, who would want to live in an ugly tree?
Loneliness followed. The seasons and years passed. One by one, the crooked tree's bitter fruits fell, uneaten and forgotten. Until one snowy winter evening, a bird with a broken wing fell from the heavens onto the tree. The bird asked if she may rest awhile. The aged tree rejoiced but was sad that it had nothing left to offer her as its branches were bare of leaves and fruit. Still, the feeble tree gathered its remaining twigs to shelter the bird from the harsh winter cold.
The bird's wing had healed by springtime, but the tree did not blossom; its life had left. The bird lifted the hollowed tree's spirit to the sky and said, "You mended my wing in a time of need, and now I shall carry you to a place without suffering."
This sad story, in some ways, is our own. We all strive to be different, become individuals in our own right and under our rules, and carve out our destiny under our flag. What if distinction in a world of conformity inadvertently brings loneliness and rejection, frailty and suffering? Would we still want to be special?
Your most defining period in life occurs the one time in your life you are truly incredible: when you are a child. You double your weight in the first six months of life. You double your height by the age of three. This is something you will never again achieve in a similar period. Your amazing growth continues. At age four, your facial skeleton reaches sixty percent of its adult size. By age twelve, ninety percent of your facial growth is complete. The largest growth increments occur during the earliest years of your life.
What if you grew crooked? What if a deviant beginning in this world twisted you into a curious shape? What if something went wrong, terribly wrong, during those crucial early years that compromised you as a human being? Would you trip over yourself for the rest of your life? Would you be enslaved with chains of your own making?
Childhood is a precarious time when the smallest indiscretion, the slightest mistake, can taint a lifetime. What fate would lie in wait if you eat mush and the muscles of mastication became weak, and the mouth fell open? Where will the winds of destiny take you if allergies and infections freely entered your body through an agape mouth and inflamed the structures within your face, leaving you little choice but to continue gasping through an open mouth? What enduring consequences would you suffer switching from breathing through your nose to breathing through your mouth during the precious pivotal early years?
Egil Peter Harvold is a Norwegian orthodontist who wondered the same thing, but he went one step further. In 1981, Egil and his team put Rhesus monkeys ranging in age from two to six years under anesthesia to have their noses surgically sewn shut with silicon plugs. Accustomed to breathing through their nose, the young monkeys awoke suddenly, having to adapt to breathing only through their mouth. How did these monkeys, the sad and undeserving recipients of a cruel misfortune in their formative years of life, fare?
Not well.
With their noses sewn shut, some monkeys clenched their teeth and widely separated their lips to breathe. Others opened their mouth, stuck out their tongue, and let their lower jaw fall back to breathe. A few opened their mouth and jutted their lower jaw forward to breathe. Still, others rhythmically opened and closed their mouth with every breath. Each found a way to breathe in their way, but they had to do it through the mouth.
So it began, the beginning of the end, the teetering collapse of the first domino that set off a chain of devastation. By switching from nasal to oral breathing, the monkeys adopted an open mouth posture that altered the face, jaw, tongue, and neck muscle activity. Remarkably, in a relatively short period, the unnatural tugging and relaxation of these muscles on the growing bones of the face and jaw slowly deformed the appearance of the monkeys.
The young monkeys grew unnaturally long and narrow faces as if they had taken the sick shape of a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Their teeth shifted to a crowded and distorted position. Their bite changed depending on how they positioned their jaw to breathe. The monkeys that rhythmically opened and closed their mouth and let their lower jaw fall back to breathe acquired an overbite. The few that opened their mouth and jutted their lower jaw forward to breathe got an underbite.
It is surprising and sickening to realize how something as seemingly harmless as breathing through the mouth can derange the skeleton of the face. The earlier in life these changes occurred, the greater the aberrations in facial growth. Egil had successfully transformed the young monkeys into freaks of nature. Perhaps more importantly to ask, are you, am I, are we all freaks of nature?
Think bank to see the hidden perils that are now in plain sight. Did you bottle feed? If so, the thrusting of the tongue to express milk from the mother's breast - the force driving the forward growth of your face - was absent. Did you suck your thumb? Then your thumb, rather than the tongue, defined the shape of your upper dental arch. Did you eat mush? Under that circumstance, weakening the jaw muscles and opening the mouth during a pivotal accelerated growth period deformed your face in many ways, some subtle and some noticeable.
Who are you? Who have you become? Are you the person you wish to be? Are you living the life you want to live? What are the forces that shaped you during your early critical growing years? And are those same deviant forces continuing to mold you as a person today? Did you grow straight or crooked?
Chapter Three Conclusion