A familiar tree can connect a person’s childhood and old age without recognizing either.

A tree can be present at the beginning and end of a life without registering either. It stood there when you were small and stands there now, and the continuity you feel is entirely on your side, since nothing about it holds a record of you. It provides the constant against which you measure your own change.

Things like this are worth keeping in your life on purpose. A place, an object, a walk you have done for decades: they give you a fixed point that lets you see movement you could not otherwise detect. Choose one and return to it deliberately. The value is not in being remembered but in having something that does not change.