Fall Reminds Us That Change Can Be Beautiful

Here is a piece of grade school science that changed how I see the fall coming.

Leaves do not turn colors. Not really. The yellows and the oranges were in that leaf the entire time, all summer long, sitting underneath the green and completely invisible. Chlorophyll is just so loud, so relentlessly green, that it covers everything else. When the days shorten and the tree stops making chlorophyll, the green fades out, and what was underneath finally gets to show.

Nothing new was added to that leaf in the fall. Something loud got quiet, and the truth underneath came up.

I have thought about that for years, because it is one of the best pictures I know of what happens to people in a season of change.

What shows up when the green goes

Most of us have a green. It is the loud, productive, capable thing we run on: the job, the role, the pace, the performance, the thing we are known for. It works, it is often genuinely good, and it covers everything else about us so completely that we forget there is anything else.

Then a season comes along and the green fades. The kids grow up, the position ends, the body slows, the illness arrives, the marriage changes shape. And here is what people say to me in that season, over and over: I do not know who I am without it.

What I have watched happen, though, in person after person, is that things start showing that were there the whole time. A woman who ran hard for twenty years discovers she is funny again. A man who was all output finds out he is a good listener and always was. People find tenderness, curiosity, patience, faith that had been in them since childhood and had simply been overrun by the loud thing on top.

You are not becoming somebody new in this season. You are becoming visible. There is a difference, and it matters, because becoming new sounds like work and becoming visible sounds like rest.

Why change scares us even when it is good

Now let me be a therapist for a minute, because “change can be beautiful” is easy to put on a sign and hard to feel in your chest.

Your nervous system does not evaluate change on whether it is good or bad. It evaluates change on whether it is familiar. Something in you treats every unfamiliar thing as a potential threat until proven otherwise, which is why people get anxious before a wedding, jittery about a promotion, and strangely unsettled after finally getting the thing they prayed for. That reaction is not ingratitude and it is not a lack of faith. It is a body doing its job.

So if you are in a season that everybody keeps calling exciting while your stomach stays in a knot, nothing is wrong with you. Panic and beauty can share a month. What helps is not talking yourself out of the feeling but giving your system what it actually needs during change, which is anything steady it can hold onto. Keep some rhythms. Same bedtime, same coffee, same Sunday. Familiar edges make an unfamiliar middle survivable.

Change on a schedule

The other thing fall does well is show change happening slowly and on purpose.

A maple does not blow up its entire life in one afternoon. It changes over weeks. Some branches go early, some hang on green until November, and there is a long stretch where the tree is honestly a mess to look at, half gold and half green and dropping things all over the yard. If that tree were a person, somebody would tell it to make up its mind.

You get to be in process too. You are allowed to be half turned. You do not owe anybody a finished transformation by a deadline, and the awkward middle where you are neither who you were nor who you are becoming is not a failure of the change. It is the change, in the only form it comes in.

“Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it?” (Isaiah 43:19, NKJV). Notice the tense. Now it shall spring forth, present, underway, in progress. Not once you have it figured out.

Something in you is coming up right now that the green was covering. Give it a few more weeks of light.

This is education, not therapy, and reading it does not make me your therapist. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

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