Fall Is Not the Beginning of the End
The first cool morning always catches me off guard. You step out for the paper or to start the car. You notice that the air has changed overnight, and you can smell that something is different. Every year somebody says the same thing to me within about a week of that morning. “Well, here comes the sad part of the year.”
I understand why we say it. Fall arrives right when the light starts leaving. For a lot of people it carries anniversaries: the diagnosis, the funeral, the year everything came apart. September and October have a way of showing up with luggage.
I want to argue with the sentence a little, gently, because I think we have the whole season backwards.
The Story We Tell About October
We treat fall as the year winding down. Summer was the living part, the green part. The part with the ball games, the garden, and the long evenings. Now everything is dying off, and winter is the ending. January is where we finally get to start over.
That is a tidy story. It just does not match what is actually happening in the yard.
What the Tree is Doing While You Feel Sad About It
A maple dropping its leaves in October is not dying, and it is not resting yet either. It is working, harder than it worked in July, on things nobody can see from the road.
By the time the color turns, next spring’s buds are already formed. They were set back in late summer, tiny and tight and folded up along the branches, and they are out there right now on every tree you drive past. The leaves you are mourning came off a tree that already has next year in hand. While the top of that tree looks emptier every week, the roots keep growing down in the warm ground long after the branches go bare, and the sugar the tree made all summer gets pulled back and stored where the cold cannot reach it.
Preparation, all of it. Not one bit of it looks like preparation from the outside. From the outside it looks like a tree losing everything it had.
Why this matters for the season you are in
I sit with people in exactly that spot every week. From the outside, their life looks like subtraction. A marriage ended, a job went away, a child moved out, a body quit doing what it used to do, a role they held for twenty years got handed to somebody else. Friends say encouraging things and they nod and go home and stand in the kitchen wondering what on earth is left.
Here is what I want to say to that, and I want to say it carefully, because I am not handing you a bow. Loss is loss, and I am not going to call your hard thing a blessing in disguise. Some of what fell away should never have fallen away, and I will not spiritualize that.
What I am saying is that seasons of falling away and seasons of preparation are frequently the same season, and you cannot always tell which one you are in by looking. The tree cannot tell either. It has no idea what it looks like. It just does the next right thing in order: pull the sugar back, seal the wound, set the bud, grow the root. Nobody out there is standing in the yard delivering a pep talk to the maple.
You may be doing more important work right now than you have done in years. Grieving is work. Healing is work. Sitting in an unglamorous stretch where nothing is visibly growing is work, and it is the kind that decides what is possible for you two years from now.
The oldest promise about seasons
After the flood, when the world had been stripped down to about as bare as a world gets, God made a promise that reads like weather and lands like theology: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22, NKJV).
Notice He did not promise perpetual summer. He promised the turning. Cold is in the covenant. Winter made the list. The God who set this thing in motion built a world where things fall away on purpose and on schedule, and then keep coming back, and He called that arrangement good and swore to keep it going.
So if this September has that heaviness in it for you, you are not being dramatic and you are not doing faith wrong. You are living in a season that genuinely takes something out of a person. I would just ask you to hold the possibility, lightly, that what looks like the beginning of the end is the beginning of something else entirely.
Over the next several weeks I want to walk through this season with you: what falls away, why release hurts even when it is right, and what is quietly happening under the ground while everything up top looks bare. Baby steps, progress over perfection. Let’s start by looking at that maple a little differently.
This is education, not therapy, and reading it does not make me your therapist. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
