It seems unfair that people have much shorter lives that trees, especially the yew tree. What does man do about that?Man's reality is his mortality. Man's unreality is his having a life at all. Man's desire is to make life fair and even. Man's actions are to destroy that which reminds him of his own mortality.
Perhaps there is another possibility which is to see one's mortality as immortality since one was never supposed to exist at all, if one thought logically. The inability to think more fully about our existence happens because we have this emotion within us to destroy. Were we instead to think in terms of the preservation of all things, we would not be faced so continuously with the forces of destruction. We can capture the forces of creativity and build novelty into our life and approach to death.
What is missing from man's psyche is the desire to be creatively novel by combining reality with unreality. Novelty that brings the real and unreal together is nevertheless at the heart of our experience. We continuously have feelings and visions of things thrown at us that we cannot deny and yet which are in a very importance sense novel. Combining our feelings with our other sensations allows us to get beyond our traditional habits of thinking. Setting thoughts aside, we can have a doorway to understanding that is neither real nor spiritual, but novel, a combining of both aspects of our passage through time. Novelty can enthrall us and comfort us as well as enlighten us.
