Sit under a young tree and you feel pleasant. Sit near a very old tree — one that has stood for centuries — and you feel something different. A quiet. A tranquility. An inner peace that seems to come from the tree itself.
Why does an old tree carry this stillness?
Because it has accepted everything.
It never refused the rain that soaked it. It never argued with the sun that scorched its leaves. It never resisted the wind that bent its branches or the snow that weighed them down. For a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred — it has simply received whatever the sky has given. It has lived in complete agreement with the laws of nature.
That long surrender is what we feel when we sit near it. The tree is not at peace because nothing has happened to it. The tree is at peace because it stopped fighting what happens.
A young tree has not yet learned this. It is still pushing toward the light, still bending only where it must, still in the middle of its bargaining with the world. Its branches are full of intention. We feel that, too — vitality, yes, but not yet stillness.
The old tree has finished bargaining.
This is what Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji teaches as Hukam — divine will, the order of the Creator that runs through everything. Acceptance of Hukam is not resignation. It is not giving up. It is the deep recognition that the rain, the sun, the heat, the cold, the loss, the gain — all of it is moving through us according to a wisdom larger than our preferences.
ਹੁਕਮਿ ਰਜਾਈ ਚਲਣਾ ਨਾਨਕ ਲਿਖਿਆ ਨਾਲਿ ॥ Walk in the way of His Will, O Nanak; it is written along with you.
A person who accepts their fate and destiny — not passively, not with bitterness, but with the deep yes of one who has stopped arguing with what is — begins to carry the same stillness as the old tree. Others feel it near them. Not because that person has had an easy life, but because they have stopped fighting the life they were given.
This is one of the quieter promises of Bani. The peace is available. The path is acceptance.
The tree shows us how.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ ॥ ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫਤਿਹ ॥