Lessons from Sweet September

 Today my fall-baby-number seven-anticipator heart is so full and so happy. 

It's the eve of September2020. 

August 31st as most would call it. But I can't help myself. As someone who loves to look forward to life, I also really love "eves." 

This is perhaps my favorite moment of anticipation every year. 

It's nearly September. Nearly the start of my favorite season. When the blue sky gets brighter and the wind blows crisper and the leaves give in to all of the change and let go to be carried away into their next big adventure. Everything feels warmer and smells cozier. It makes you want to reach for someone's hand--makes you extra grateful when you have a hand to hold. The sun glows more golden in September. 

I come alive in the fall. In some extra special way that I've never quite been able to put my finger on. I can't really explain it. I savor every Saturday. Every Sunday. Every evening stroll. Every cup of coffee. Every oversized cozy sweater worn in a brand new way. Leaves landing in my windblown hair. 

This year is strange. That's for sure. And I think we're all carrying this unspoken weight of anxiety as we travel forward the best that we can into so much unknown. So much uncertainty. I suppose the same unknowns and uncertainties that have always always been up ahead. Yet, somehow, this year they feel more real and vivid and often more paralyzing than ever before. Maybe because now we're painfully and uncomfortably aware of them. We can't ignore them any longer. But still there is nowhere to go but forward. 

And in the slower moments--if I'm being completely honest--it all terrifies me. Which is strange because usually I welcome change and leaps of faith and grand adventures where I figure it out along the way. 

But this is next level. Mostly because it is uncertainty that I did not choose for myself. 

New seasons personally and professionally and the whole world in limbo along with my own. 

But also. 

Somehow. 

Miraculously

Beautifully. 

There is peace. Calm. A sense of acceptance that for the first time ever, maybe, we're all in exactly the same place. No one can claim to know what's next or how they'll face it more than anyone else. We're all just taking it one day at a time. Moment by moment. No one can race ahead. No one can fall behind. We all just have to be present. Here and now. And we all just have to dig deeper than ever before and do it afraid and move forward into all of the unknowns together.

And. 

there has to be so much grace. 

With ourselves and with each other. 

Because everyday we're all just taking blind, giant leaps of faith off the edges of undiscovered cliffs into unknown belows and the darkest darks anyone has ever had to navigate. 

And who knows where we'll end up. After the leaves change and the cold comes and we begin again fully immersed in a new decade that has been anything but kind to us so far. 

It's funny how fall brings about so much change--so much letting go. And yet, it's one thing we can depend on year after year. That it will come to us again as it always has. 

Change, they say, is the only thing that will remain constant in this life. Change and letting go. How lovely fall is at teaching us these truths--sometimes harsh truths-while wrapping us up in her cozy, warm glow as if she's put some of life's hardest most complex lessons in the prettiest of pictures books. Like she's reading us a bedtime story and helping us to embrace it all.