This afternoon I went for a walk with my daughter that ended up being a much longer excursion than originally anticipated. I like adventure and wanted to explore new neighborhoods, so I started off in a different direction and was enjoying seeing a new area. However, after a short time, I started encountering dead ends. Lots of dead ends. I went one way and kept coming to streets that had signs that said “no outlet” or just “dead end.”
The road I was on began to go down, like reeeeeeally downhill. Pushing the stroller with a 22-pound kid, I wasn’t necessarily wanting to go down, but I also wanted to find a new route home so I didn’t have to trace the same steps I’d come.
My sense of adventure won out, so I kept going further down the hill. I could see a number of streets branching off to the right and to the left up ahead, which kept me hopeful. Every time I would get close enough, I would see the sign: no outlet.
But the adventure cells in brain said keep going and find a new way home. So I kept going down the blasted hill until I got to the very bottom. It was a very loooooong, curvy hill. I passed many streets along the way, none of which went through.
I finally get to the bottom of the hill where the road comes to a ‘T’ and there’s an elementary school, and I thought to myself, ‘Great! This is looking promising.’
I look to my left and—you guessed it—no outlet. So I turn right and walk past the school a few more blocks. I can see a number of roads to the left and right ahead, but even from where I was, I could see that they all had the dreaded yellow diamond sign.
I finally gave in to my destiny and re-climbed the same hill and retraced my steps home, super exhausted and thirsty.
The plus side of my adventure, however, was that it gave me a lot of time to think. I was thinking about how I kept going and going, not wanting to endure the work of coming back up the hill, but wanting so badly to find a new route.
I refused to let go of my goal to find a different way to walk home, and in turn, I got a lot more exercise, but ultimately ended up with an unfulfilled goal that I had to let go of.
Yesterday while scrolling through Facebook, someone had posted a picture of fall leaves with this quote:
“The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.”
I love this. My favorite season is fall. I love the colors, I love the excuse to bust out my favorite scarves and sweaters and enjoy a hot cup of tea or coffee midday to take away the chill.
While I think the changing colors of leaves is beautifully breathtaking, you and I both know that the leaves are going to fall off and ‘die.’ The tree as a whole doesn’t die, it just goes through the winter months conserving energy, and then come spring, new growth happens.
Sometimes in life we go through fall seasons—seasons when we have to let go of things that maybe at the time don’t seem lovely, but that ultimately allow new growth to happen after a fallow winter season.
I think change is hard; I always have. I am a person that takes time to adjust to new things and when change happens suddenly, the struggle is real.
Some change is out of our control—sickness, death, jobs, geographic location—but other changes we choose, like schooling or marriage or children.
I’ve always thought that my biggest struggle with change was when things happened to me beyond my control, but in a recent conversation I realized that there are many times in my life when I’ve embraced changed.
Want to know what the common thread was? Gain. Seasons when I chose to go to school or chose to get married, or have a child—in those cases, I had something to gain.
The common thread between the changes I really struggled to overcome? Loss. Whether through loss of a life, loss of relationship, or some other type of loss, the changes that really seemed to rock my world were when I suffered deep personal loss.
It was a bit of an ah-ha moment for me. Maybe it’s not so much about change itself, or control, but about gains and losses.
Rather than focusing on what I can and can’t control, because, let’s be real here, there isn’t a whole lot we CAN control, and in our lives we’ll experience a lot of changes beyond our control, so it pays to focus on responding to loss rather than responding to change.
In realizing this, it doesn’t negate the fact that loss is still real, and sometimes it’s very, very painful. But let’s at least call it what it is.
And the good news? Spring will come.
I remember my first winter living in Toronto, Ontario with temperatures as low as -35 with wind chill. For months on end we had snow piled above my head, I walked with all my muscles tense bracing against the cold, and I felt like it would never end.
But then one day I woke up and heard birds chirping. I went outside and could see that the snow was melting and the air didn’t quite have the same chill as it had for so many months.
Spring had come. I was ecstatic and I remember feeling my muscles loosen—muscles that seemed to have been tensed against the cold for months. It was a crazy sensation, and it was the first time that truly appreciated the newness of spring.
I wish that the letting go in our lives was as beautiful as the fall leaves. Too often, the process doesn’t feel lovely, or even look lovely, for that matter.
As I walked today and saw evidence of trees turning from green to red, I reflected on my own ‘fall season’ of life, a season of letting go.
It hasn’t been easy, but my heart is hopeful: spring will come.