Lessons from the seasons of life
Heartwarming are the changing seasons of life. When I was a youngster, life was about winter, spring, summer and fall, and each season had its highlights, beginning with Santa Claus in the winter.
As I grew older, I came to see winter, spring, summer and fall more properly — i.e., as the seasons of the year, while the seasons of life were much more profound.
The ancient scriptures tell us that to everything there’s a season — a time to plant and a time to reap, a time to speak and a time to remain silent, a time to live and a time to die.
These thoughts came to mind last week as I was having my morning coffee, gazing out the living room window to view the plants, animals and insects that come and go and blossom and die with the seasons, what Canadian
songwriter and author, Amy Foster, describes as the color and majesty of fall, the bare branches of winter, the tentative buds of spring, and the heavy sensuality of summer.
For reasons I do not know, this year’s seasonal changes, beginning this past summer, have made a deep impression on me. My morning routine is the same — same coffee, same cream, same living room, same outdoor space. Yet now I am seeing things I never saw before.
This past summer, I enjoyed the beautiful trees and flowers — dogwood, hydrangea, coneflower, and many black-eyed Susans, our state flower. This year, however,
I noticed something else: the insects, the bees and butterflies sipping from the Abelia blossoms and the spiders with their webs gilding the windowsills. Each morning, the spider’s web would have captured a wasp, mosquito or some other feast.
Then came autumn. One day while having my morning java, my eyes caught the falling leaves. One or two here, a small cluster there. They were different colors, some from oak trees, some from maple trees, others from sweet gums. I was struck not only by the beauty of the leaves drifting from the trees but also by the role they were playing in the cycle of life as they settled to the earth where they would be transformed into nutrients that would help spark next year’s growth of grass and flowers and other living things.
Moreover, all this change is perfectly OK. As American businessman and author Donald Miller has said, “All the trees are losing their leaves, and not one of them is worried.”
Then, later in the week, as we were having dinner with friends and I was sharing my new-found interest in the changing seasons, one of our friends offered that “Autumn is the time when trees show us the grandeur of letting go.”
“Well said,” I remarked. “There’s a lot of wisdom in learning to let go.”
Back in 2001, when I first started thinking about and then living through the transition to my own post-career years (what some call “retirement”), I learned that it’s important in every transition to take time out, nail down what you want to do next and decide what from your previous life you want to keep and what needs to be let go.
Since my own retirement at age 61, I have been through not one but several transitions (i.e., failed retirements). Throughout, however, my calling as a teacher — in a university, in business, in political and public policy organizations — has never changed. What has changed is the institutional setting and my day-to-day activities.
After my third failed retirement, which ended in late 2008, I wrote “Reboot: What to do when your career is over, but your life isn’t.” Published in 2011, I used “Reboot” to share research and my own experience navigating later life in the new age of longevity.
One year later, in 2012, then Capital editor-in-chief Tom Marquardt gave me the opportunity to write about how the experiences of people and organizations who are changing aging in Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay area.
That marked the beginning of 283 weekly Bonus Years columns, edited in the beginning by Rob Hiaasen until that unspeakable day in June 2018.
In the years since, we’ve written more than 250 columns devoted to individuals. Another 30 or so reporting on aging research or focused on state and county agencies as well as nonprofit organizations that are doing so much to enrich the lives and expand opportunities for later-life individuals to continue to use their gifts — their time, talent and treasure — to help others or repair the world.
This opportunity to celebrate the lives of so many who are living the “color and majesty” as well as the challenges and losses of their own “autumn years” has been an enormous blessing to me, — and I hope a source of inspiration to readers of all ages. Indeed, the stories we’ve told are proof positive that increased longevity, now pervasive in our culture, can be a time of continued productivity, fulfillment, and satisfaction.
As the autumn of 2021 is about to pass, I’ve concluded that it’s also time for me to let go. Letting go is never easy, particularly when you love what you are doing. But I need to follow the advice I give to others and get to work on other projects, including one for my children and grandchildren, a second for Historic Annapolis, another to reduce recidivism while bringing hope for new beginnings for those who are incarcerated, and occasional op-ed commentaries on a variety of subjects, hopefully in this paper, too.
The naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau put it elegantly: “Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and accept the influences of each.”
In the meantime, to combine two Bonus Years oldies, “Thanks for the memories . . . until we meet again!”