‘Most people are living four or five years behind the curve of
their own transformation.’
David Whyte
It is a rare thing - here at least- for the weather to play perfect ball with the calendar that foretells it. So often the elements suffer from more whimsy that that - give us a bitterly cold day in June, or an unseasonably warm bonfire night, or- as was once the case a few years ago- 21 degrees on a day in February. Often it is this erratic nature, this unpredictability, that has us all sighing in despair (or less often, compelled by unexpected delight ) than the specifics of the day itself. Planning around the elements in this country is almost an impossibility.
But yesterday saw the Autumn Equinox; that momentary point of balance between the hours of night and day that is less about equilibrium and more the marker of the tipping point from summer to autumn. The cusping (not a verb I know but it should be and so I have decided to start using it) from the lighter to the darker half of the year. And on cue we were taken from a week as beautiful as any this year - warm and soft and somehow soulful- and plunged into near biblical rain. Last night my husband and I woke, simultaneously and startled, to a thunderclap so loud that it sounded like the sky had been ripped open and rain literally and all of a sudden poured from its heavens. And it is now well into the morning and it hasn’t yet stopped, isn’t predicted to all day.
It is decidedly autumn and not winter that we have been pushed into. The air is still sultry, almost tropical. There is no lick of real cold yet, the leaves are still on most of the trees in abundance and still more green than the russet that they will necessarily start to go. But this morning took a long time to arrive and I am feeling- viscerally- the pull to spiral more inwards. To sleep a little more, to do a little less, to start to pile books up high with the relish that I am going to be gifted long nights to devour them. Every evening I feel like different food now; vegetables that have been cooked, meats that are stewed, everything more fragrant and generous and to be eaten from bowls. These transitions from one season to another happen very definitely to both our inner and outer landscapes at the same time. We too are seasonal.
Some change we are more than ready for. The seasons cycle around annually and with such familiarity that each carries the memories of the accumulation of them. We are, as humans, deeply associative. And so at the threshold of each season we are often engulfed by a heady nostalgia for this collage of remembered experience - the woodsmoke, the particular smell of rain, the invitation to playfulness of fallen leaves, the feel of a shining chocolate conker in the hand, the first hot water bottle at our feet in bed, flannel pyjamas, houses lit from the inside in the increasing dark of an early evening, enticing our imaginations to the worlds of the people glimpsed inside and the way everything, in the autumn, somehow smells mossy. But all change is both a process of embracing and shedding, the necessary acceptance of loss that moving from one state to another- even if just seasonally- entails. To fully alter we are required to let go of things that we can be tempted to keep a hold of.
There is a wonderful exhibition on at the Weston library in Oxford called ‘Write, Cut, Rewrite’ dedicated to the art and imperative of editing in literature. (It is a tiny exhibition - which so many of the best ones are- and genuinely so good it is worth detour to Oxford if you are ever nearby.) Displaying manuscripts from the literary archives of the Bodleian it includes works from many of the greats of literature; Mary and Percy Shelley, Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, James Joyce and Raymond Chandler and shows on the page, their process of cutting, rewriting, and editing. It is of course especially interesting to anyone who writes - showcasing as it does the way in which good writing requires the killing - as Stephen King famously advised- of even our darlings. But it struck me, as I marvelled at the creative bravery of the writers, as in literature so in life. This editing process applies to us all.
Good living is an act of constant incarnation and re-incarnation and to be done well we need to be willing to edit. We all know people who have got stuck in a particular stage of life, unwilling to give up a misspent youth or an aspect of their childish self - or even an outdated project - which effectively then holds them in a stasis that can and will become limiting. But as the poet David Whyte beautifully puts it, ‘if you were a farmer and you tried to harvest what belonged to a previous season, you’d exhaust yourself trying to bring it in when it is no longer there’. Life lives in motion. Stasis is ultimately the opposite of nature. And shedding - be it a season or an outdated aspect of ourselves- is a necessary precursor to the evolution that is required to fully inhabit each stage of life. Good ageing - which I wholeheartedly believe to be possible- requires a skin shedding that can be deeply uncomfortable, not least because our extrovert culture discounts life beyond youth in both subtle and also meaningful ways. We are enticed to want for an eternal summer. And it is hard to live, even for a short time, unmasked. And yet it is no coincidence that all spiritual traditions agree that a marker of happiness is how we develop the capacity to yield to the forces of evolution that exist ultimately beyond our control, to move in synchrony with the grain of living rather than rubbing up against it, and to unclench our hold on the necessary passage of time. When Stephen Fry was once asked how he felt on approach to a significant birthday, he said ‘well, it is better than the alternative’. Part of the lesson of the seasons is that there is no alternative but to transform. It is foundational to living, is living, and doing it well requires a certain settling into the process. Requires an acceptance that with the rain falling hard outside, and the house gloomier than we mighty like, that a day indoors, with candles lit and a soup on the hob, might be necessary, even welcome.