The Fall Season Of Life Is Your New Beginning

I wonder whether I’m in the Fall Season of my life, but don’t Google it as I don’t want to know-know. If life = 100 years, I’m entering the super-early beginning of my Fall season. I don’t recalculate the math if life = 86 years, or 92, 79, or tomorrow. I don’t bother with other numbers, knowing some of us become human-shaped holes too early in the lives of people who love us.

I mean, it’s always too early, but sometimes, it’s really too early-early, and we grieve with mamas and find butterfly magic to try and wrap our heads around loss. I could go down a rabbit-hole here, but will try to stay on topic.

Anyway, even though Fall is in the top four of my favorite seasons of the year, it’s also the 9:00 p.m. of the full day. Fall is three quarters of a whole.

Some things are better left unknown, like what season we’re experiencing right now in our lives. Rather than looking at Fall being the third phase of a whole, I think about how it’s a beginning.

The Fall Season Of Life Is Your New Beginning

School doesn’t start in January. Sharpened pencils sporting full-sized, still-working erasers, and notebooks with crisp pages waiting for whatever brilliance is written on them is happening now.

Now is the new beginning. 

New teachers, a new school year, new perspectives. New clothes, even, because the Summer season isn’t as cruel to kids’ gangly, growing forever it seems limbs as the pants that fit a few months ago now being high-waters.

Each Fall, I’m surprised to notice sunset happening earlier. “It’s Fall now,” I remind myself. “September, actually.” “Duh.” 

And yet, every night, I notice the setting sun, look at the clock, and experience genuine surprise. It’s 6:59 p.m. and my body thinks it’s 8:00-ish, although the same sun-setting thing’s been happening for a few weeks. A little earlier each day. 

Having 80 degree weather and trees dressed in green doesn’t help, but still. School’s been in session for a month. 

The Fall Season Of Life Is Your New Beginning

With Fall, there’s new learning, the promise of leaves crunching underfoot, and moments of profound greatness. A conversation with your son that you’d never prepared for, and rocked regardless. 

The night you leave his room feeling like “I did this moment right,” and felt a profound sense of honor shadows the other 1,001 moments this month or this day you questioned yourself.

For this moment, you got it right. It’s Fall, and there’s promise. Seasons change, after all. And so do we.

It may be the third quarter on your ever-swishing calendar, and of your life, but it can be a new beginning, too.  Fall just may be the season you decide to take up horseback riding after a (very) long absence.

It can be the season your fifth-grader makes a new friend, and comes home after playing with him to tell you they were in sewer drains, excited for adventure. Your heart will stop a bit, because you know how quickly rain comes, and how there’s no escaping flooding drains, but also, maybe this is the season you know kids will wander into open drains, and most of the time, they’re fine.

This can be the season you see the almost-unbearable-thankfulness that your kid had kids to play with today, and that they frolicked in the sunshine under a cloudless sky, rather than knowing how quickly clouds move in to fill up empty sewer drains. 

This can be the season when you give thanks to the sky, to life, to a moment, and the time you decide not to take away your kid’s joy about sewers and drains by freaking out about safety. 

He’s already got a broken arm, and not worrying about all the elses in the what elses that can happen can become your superpower.

Fall can be the time in your life when you realize you need to let go a little, and also live a little more yourself.

It can be when you know you’ll never jump out of a perfectly good airplane on purpose again, but also the time when you know you can still make the rest of your life whatever you want it to be, regardless of what the nine-o-clock nay-sayer in your brain tells you.

If it’s not obvious from the above, Fall can be when each of us takes note of life, and change what we need to change, to make the best of this new start. I’m working on that, and welcome your ideas and stories about your own Fall seasons, or falls in general.

XO,
Kristi

*** This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post with the prompt “The best things about Fall…”