Fall as told by TV and popular media is an orderly affair. The tree leaves change colors from burnt orange to deep amber, and eventually they all fall off.
But if you actually pay attention to the trees around your home, as I did yesterday on a walk, this transition is not uniform at all. One tree may be just sticks by Halloween, while the one next to it is still full of leaves. Even on an individual tree, the leaves change at different rates.
Now that we’re here in November, we’re entering that period of fall where the pretty part of the transition is (mostly) over, and we’re left with the piles of wet leaves rotting in the gutters and clogging the drains. There’s even a decent argument that this period of fall isn’t even really fall – but a sixth season called “Locking”.
The point is – we always hope for these nice, tidy transitions. where one stage becomes the next. Where one day we’re planning, and the next, we’re executing. Yet we fail to recognize that rarely does such dramatic transition exist anywhere else. Certainly not in nature, and probably nowhere outside our own imagined standards.
Instead, change is a gradual, messy process. Worth keeping in mind if you’re ever feeling like your efforts are stalling – it could be you need to give it a little while longer, and let the rest of the trees lose their leaves.
