I have a fun piece of trivia for you: Guess what animal plants more trees than any other? Squirrels. They do it accidentally by forgetting where they stash all the nuts they hide. I love that little fact.

I think about this whenever my life tightens around not forgetting — calendars, reminders, color-coded hierarchies of urgency. Some of this is necessary. Try working in a very deadline-driven field like journalism.

But beneath the buzz of staying on top of everything is a quieter question: What is the cost of never letting anything go?

The squirrel offers a counterpoint. It doesn’t intend to plant a forest. It’s simply living, noticing what’s in front of it, taking what it needs, leaving more than it realizes. Those missed caches are not failures. They’re the mechanism by which woods perpetuate themselves — an imperfect memory that makes room for something beyond the self that did the stashing.

We’re told to hold on to opinions, outrage, and a version of ourselves that will be safe if we keep adding to it. We hoard ideas like winter food. But some of what we store might be better off in the ground. Not every thought needs retrieval. Not every slight deserves a return visit.

This isn’t an argument for apathy. It’s an argument for loosened grip. When you ease your fist, your hand can touch more. We confuse care with clinging, as if commitment requires a permanent clench. Yet the world keeps offering examples of open-handed commitment: the tide that keeps arriving, the tree that gives shade without a ledger, the squirrel that, by forgetting, provides.

Everything leans on everything else. The squirrel travels through woods shaped by trees it never knew it helped plant. Oaks rise from soil woven by fungi that trade sugars and minerals with roots they will never see. Even the air is a network of shared breath. The life of a forest isn’t a single heroic act; it’s a choreography of small, incomplete gestures, each one relying on the others.

Try an experiment. The next time you feel the itch to win a conversation, don’t. Plant your best line and walk away. See what grows when you stop digging up the moment to check whether you were right. Or take one recurring worry — one you revisit like a buried nut — and give it a week without your attention. Not repressed, just not tended. Let weather and time work on it. Notice what’s left.

It can feel risky to loosen your grip because control is a convincing storyteller. It whispers that without it, nothing will remain. The forest suggests the opposite. When some things are allowed to be forgotten, more things are allowed to be. A lost acorn isn’t waste; it’s a wager that the world is bigger than our plans.

We still need lists and clocks and food for winter. We still stash. We still work. The point isn’t carelessness; it’s porous care. Keep what keeps you alive; release what keeps you small. Trust that not everything requires your constant supervision to become real. The woods thank the squirrel for its oversight. We might thank ourselves for ours.