On holding the ache — and letting it make us whole
Autumn is the faint glow of candles in a melancholy world.
It’s the warmth of a fire when it’s brisk outside, the particular quality of light on an October afternoon that makes everything look both beautiful and far away. It’s the grief in the heart with nowhere to go — the memories without a future, the longing without a clear source. An unnamed ache that settles in like fog.
If you feel this in autumn, you’re not alone. And you’re not broken.
What you are is human — and maybe more awake to all that entails than in other seasons.
Autumn has a way of stripping things down to what’s real. The trees don’t pretend. They let go of their leaves, not with drama, but with a kind of accepting honesty, releasing what they no longer need in the most spectacular way possible. There’s something both sad and deeply comforting about watching the leaves fall.
In Autumn we may feel the things we usually try to keep away. The remembrance of our limited time on earth. The quiet acknowledgement of our unfinished dreams — the things we meant to do, the selves we never became. The humble, sometimes startling insight of our small and precious place in the long passage of time.
These aren’t necessarily depressing thoughts, though they can feel that way in the raw October air. They are honest thoughts. And honest thoughts, when acknowledged and given adequate time and attention, are some of the most meaningful we can ever allow ourselves.
I’ve learned through the years that the feelings autumn stirs up aren’t problems to be solved, even if they’re uncomfortable. Loneliness. Disconnection. Regret. The sense that something’s missing, even when life is full. The grief that doesn’t really have a source — it lives in a song on the radio, in the smell of woodsmoke, in seeing a pair of shoes you haven’t worn since a different chapter of your life.
This kind of feeling doesn’t need to be fixed, but it does need to be acknowledged.
There is a difference between suffering and feeling. We tend to make feelings more painful when we fight them — when we decide something is wrong with us for having them, or when we try to explain them away before we’ve really let them land. Autumn feelings have earned their place. They are part of what it means to have lived long enough, loved deeply enough, lost enough to know what mattered.
You don’t have to be cheerful in autumn. You don’t have to rush toward the light. You can sit with the ache for a little while — and trust that it’s not the whole story.
The question I find myself returning to is not how do we make the melancholy go away? but rather what are the small things that help us feel less alone in it? What reminds us that we’re part of something continuous — the long, unbroken passage of seasons, of generations, of lives that came before ours and will come after — without making light of our own individual ache for meaning?
Because that is the tension of autumn, isn’t it? We want to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. And at the same time, we need our small, specific experience to matter. Both things are true. And the things that hold us best seem to do both at once.
A stick of cinnamon in your coffee. The way the spice rises with the steam and fills the kitchen and suddenly you are in six different years at the same time — and that is tender, even if some of those years included loss.
A brisk walk in the dampness after rain has come through and the air carries that particular coolness and the leaves are down and everything smells of earth. And you can sense something beginning and something ending at once.
Or a walk through a Christmas tree lot on a bitter cold day, when the branches are fragrant and the lights are strung and you’re cold enough that the cup of hot cider or the warmth of a car afterward becomes its own small gift. The aliveness of being cold, and then warm.
These aren’t remedies, but they are companions. They say to us: you’re still here. You’re alive. And the world is still doing what the world does. And somehow we can let that be enough.
So if autumn finds your heart quietly aching this year, I want you to know a few things.
It is OK to feel it. All of it — the beauty and the grief, the gratitude and the loss, the sense of time passing and the fierce wish to hold on to something.
You don’t have to manufacture a fake sense of peace. Autumn isn’t always a peaceful season. But it is honest and beautiful and melancholic and brief. You can let yourself experience all of those things.
And in the midst of it, try to find your small comforts — the ones that are entirely yours. The ones that hold you without asking anything from you. The ones that have held you before, and will hold you again.
The candle. The walk. The cinnamon. The cold air and the lights in the dark.
The quiet, continuous fact that the world is still here, and you are still in it, and that is — in the long run — everything.
Here’s to the golden, aching, irreplaceable beauty of autumn.
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