One Saturday afternoon last fall Chris met me at the Performing Arts Library, after a contentious school rezoning meeting I was reporting on for work, and we headed to tiny Box Kite café for coffee.

Unsettled and feeling sluggish, I hadn’t gotten further than the cafe in my own plan for the day, thinking a nap sounded nice, but when Chris pulled out a worn little yellow book called Tree Trails in Central Park, I knew he’d plotted a walk well in advance, perhaps in the bath the night before.

And ever since I’ve been working on a theory that life is lived best if approached through a series of enlightening, playful, curated escapades.

The prospect of a tree walk did not thrill me. Honestly, one tree looks pretty much like another to me. Take me to a used bookstore or a gift shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn with letterpress notecards.

But I plodded after my guide because it was a lovely day, in the mid-50s, chilly and sunny and perfect for walking. We entered Central Park near west 72nd Street and soon I learned we were in search of one particular tree—a cut-leaf European beech.

It’s not easy to find a single tree across 843 acres, but the yellow book clued us in to these embossed numbered metal plaques on Central Park’s cast iron lampposts. They would guide us. The first two digits correspond to cross streets. (Who knew?) We wanted 7104, that is, a lamppost parallel to 71st Street. Now our walk took on the quality of an Easter egg hunt as we scouted around, calling out to each other the numbers on the lampposts.

As we tried to locate one lamppost that would lead us to one tree, I spotted papery, red-orange Chinese lanterns and swathes of purple-white asters, and felt my churning mind settle.

Chris hurried along the path as though the tree might get away from us and I realized that I, an educator, resist learning, because I think of it as work, but that this kind of learning was much more an exploit or caper in the nature of a scavenger hunt.

It reminded me of the time when Ingo and I packed snacks, lunches and a thermos of tea, and visited all 21 playgrounds in Central Park in one day. He was ten years old and it took us seven hours. Thanks to a little pre-research on adventure playgrounds, we learned more about the changing nature of play in NYC.

Chris has planned walks that followed evidence of all things Ethiopian in Harlem and all things Christian Science. One recent idea proposed by a friend was to walk the entire length of Myrtle Avenue and this opened whole new possibilities for ways of exploring the city. Myrtle Avenue is 8 miles long and snakes along from Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn to Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens.

All of which brings me to the cut-leaf beech. We found this broad generous tree alongside the carriage turnaround, with people resting in its shade as I suppose people had for more than 100 years. It looked like a shout of joy, its feathered fingers stretching skyward.

On our walk home my vision had changed.

All I could see were trees, trees, trees.