Hello, autumn. Come here and let me love you. I’ve always had a hard time expressing my feelings for summer. Perhaps it is the sheer bounty of it: the light, the growing things, the overwhelming, undeniable multitude of life. Now the air is cooling. The darkness of night is returning. The world turns from explosive green and searing blue into soft brown and vibrant colours of fire.
It feels strange to greet autumn this calmly. For over twenty years—twenty!—I used to associate autumn with the start of a new school term. The smell of fallen leaves and the damp of mist in the chill mornings got associated with the start of something new, with ambition, possibility, eagerness to learn and a sense of hope for the future.
It wouldn’t take long, however. Come halloween, ambition and hope would have turned to stress and anxiety. And with me being too proud to back out of things, or stubborn, or just too bloody stupid to give up, I ended up wearing myself out over a myriad of projects both inside and outside my studies. Come Christmas, I’d be a nervous wreck, feeling worthless and stupid for not managing to live up to my ridiculously over-optimistic ideas of how much I should be able to accomplish.
Here on the mountain, it all seems so stupid. Why didn’t I stop to ask myself what it was actually worth? For all my ambitions, what was I really trying to accomplish? Was I simply too scared, or embarrassed, to consider the possibility that most of what I was putting my soul into might have been misguided?
It is hard, when being so caught up in one’s reality, to look at one’s life in a broader perspective. Now all those years mostly seems to be like racing around in a circle, hoping that beyond every turn there would be a way out. That there would come a time to rest, a rest that I would have earned. That somewhere beyond the completed to do-lists there would be true and lasting happiness to be had.
I’m glad I got a chance to physically remove myself from that madness. Had I stayed in the city, I might still have been caught up in that godforsaken rat-race. Now, after a year and a half of filling my time with very few, very simple things, I think I’m finally beginning to discern the difference between what I want and what I really need.
I need time. I need space. Spaces between things, which is something I haven’t really granted myself before. On the mountain I have experienced time stretching on seemingly forever when I finally managed to slow my mind down from the overdrive which through constant overstimulation has become its default state.
It is a joyful experience, since life being too short to pursue all that I desire is probably my main source of anxiety. But I think that anxiety has diminished, because wrenching myself away physically from a lot of things I have found that while it hurts to let go, it’s not the end of the world. And only afterward it becomes apparent which of those things were actually important, and which ones I actually wouldn’t mind so much doing without.
Focus. That’s what I’ve found. I’m just a beginner, really, and I have a lot of habits to break, but I’ve gained a lot of clarity on how I would like to live my life. What I really want to pursue, what has probably been at the core of my desires all along. Details are yet to be worked out, but that’s also a major realisation: they’re really not as important as the framework. I have greater hope of finding happiness through my state of mind that through neurotically aspiring to engineer my outer circumstances to exactly correspond to my preferences. They will change, anyway, both the circumstances and the preferences, and I intend to accept and roll with that.
In the end, that’s the best I can do, and to hell with superficial ambitions. Life can be so much larger, so much more profound, so much more fulfilling than that. If I can find more joy in watching the sun rise above the distant mountains, or the sense of my bare feet against the dew-wet ground, than my heart ought to be able to contain, it means I can stop fretting so much about the future, because the sensory experience of being here and now will always be available to me.
So that’s what I intend to do, what I shall aspire to cling onto even in the bustling city: to allow myself to live in the here and the now. That is where I belong, and where I intend to build my home.
You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
— Richard Powers (The Overstory)
Love and autumn,
Winterdragon
