To Autumn

By Tom Hemphill

Each winter in Florida I miss the changing of the seasons “up north.” I don’t miss months of cold and sleet and snow, but I do miss the brilliance of autumn before winter and the euphoria of spring after the bleakness of winter. Autumn and spring, each in its own way, affirms life and celebrates living.

Spring is full of life-affirming rituals and metaphors – baby chicks, bunny rabbits, Maypole dances, housecleaning, Easter dresses, birds building nests, and coeds flocking to the beach for spring break. Our images of spring reflect the energy of new life, new beginnings, playfulness, sexuality, fertility and freedom from restrictions.

How quickly we forget that autumn has it own powerful message of life to share with us. It is in autumn that the long, hot months of summer find their meaning. The crops that grew slowly, almost imperceptibly, during the summer now produce grain, fruits and vegetables to sustain us. At harvest time, “when the frost is on the punkin’ and the fodder’s in the shock,” we see the completion of a life process, the fulfillment of a divine plan.

In the cycle of life in a temperate climate, spring is the fanfare – the opening scene that barely hints at what is to come. Summer is the build-up, the sustaining of living, the unfolding of life’s plot as a much loved familiar drama, each day building subtly on the work of the day before. But in autumn comes the whole point of it all, the glorious denouement when nature produces not just grain and fruit for eating but the very seeds that, when planted in the spring, create the whole opportunity of Life all over again.

Many writers have compared the “autumn years” of life to the turning color of autumn leaves. Leaves that have been predictably and similarly green all summer long burst into brilliant red and yellow and gold. Each one is different – different from what it was before, and different from all the other leaves.

So it is in our maturity – our fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond - that we humans come into our greatest beauty, accomplishment and fulfillment. Spring is rich with potential, summer filled with growth. In autumn, fruition comes. No longer a predictable cog in a machine, each of us is unique, choosing our own radiance, and fulfilling our lives by the gifts we make of ourselves to the world around us.

In the early summer of my adulthood, I didn’t really grasp the metaphor of bright autumn leaves and the surge of creative energy that accompanies maturity for so many people. Now that I’m in my mid-fifties, it is freeing to see the changes of my life not so much as losses of what was or could have been, but more as positive steps forward into a time that seems far more rich with opportunities than was my early adulthood.

When we use our mature years to do something greater than or different from what we did before, our life becomes a gift to us and to humanity. This is the time in life when many people study, write or teach – things they were too busy to do when they were earning an income and caring for a family every day. This is the time when many people volunteer for causes and organizations they believe in. This is the time when many people do the inner growing that they put aside while overwhelmed with all that daily living demands of us. Now we are free to grow more fully into what God calls us to be.

Freud said that the two essentials for good mental health are someone to love and meaningful work. In a recent survey, people approaching retirement were asked what they most sought for the rest of their years. Contrary to what most of us might expect, only 32 percent said they looked forward to a life of ease - golf, bridge, cruises, and playing with their grandchildren. The other 68 percent said they wanted to make a contribution in their mature years. They sought meaningful work.

We may welcome the freedom to work less strenuously, or pursue new creative interests. But the majority of us do not primarily seek self-satisfaction, pleasure and ease. We seek to make a contribution - to do the kind of work that gives life meaning and purpose.

The experts predict that, just as the generation of “baby-boomers” has fundamentally changed American society with each phase of life they went through, so they will totally re-define what it means to live and live well in one’s mature years. How refreshing it is that the majority of them seek meaningful work, even as they look forward to less drudgery.

Years ago Dr. John said that he and his colleagues in spirit found our modern concept of “retirement” a bit odd. Why would people choose a non-productive existence of leisure during the autumn of life? The concept that the early part of life is to be usefully spent, and the latter part idled away in self-centered pleasure-seeking is not in accordance with God’s plan for most of us.

Spring’s essence is expressed in playfulness. Autumn’s essence is expressed in purposefulness. Rather than a time of goofing-off, maturity is the time of each life’s richest accomplishment. Shallow self-indulgence is a poor alternative for deep self-fulfillment.

It’s not just that we owe it to ourselves to “go out in a blaze of color” as the leaves do – each of us making our unique and colorful contribution to Life. We need to change our thinking, to stop seeing this phase of life as the winding-down or coasting to a stop. The whole point of autumn in the cycle of life is that it brings fulfillment – and therefore meaning – to the long, slow unfolding that preceded it. The autumn of our life is to be celebrated.

It is no wonder that the American national celebration of Thanksgiving comes in the late fall. You cannot celebrate the process of life until you can claim the products of life. The long, hot summer only finds value in the fruits and grain it produces in the autumn.

Our mature years are the whole point of life. Everything up to this point has been good, of course, and purposeful in its own way. But it is all preliminary. It is all leading up to something. The point of the long growing season is to produce the cornucopia of autumn. We forget that the reward of going through the long decades of our lives – jobs, babies, marriage and sometimes divorce, soccer practice, violin lessons, mortgages, home repairs, teenagers, promotions, heartbreaks, college expenses – is to come to our own time of fulfillment.

It is in our later years, our brilliant-colored-leaf years, that we have unique gifts to share and the opportunity to share them. Indeed, our gifts are specifically to be shared. This is “what it’s all about.” The autumn of life is purposeful. Who we are today has been shaped by all that we went through. That experience – decades of living – was God’s way of preparing us to be who we are today.

Autumn is the season which gives meaning and fulfillment to the work begun in spring and sustained through a long summer of gradual growth. This is not a time of coasting, but a time of fulfilling the promise of Life that each of us brought into the world with our birth.

More importantly, autumn is also the time when the fulfillment of our work lays the foundation for new life that is to follow us. Every ear of corn harvested in autumn holds kernels ready to be planted and grow more corn. Every pumpkin brought in from the field has within it the seeds of more pumpkins to be planted next year. Every young adult sparrow and frog and timber wolf holds within it the capacity to mate and create more new life in the spring.

So also each of us, in the fulfillment of our life work and the fulfillment of our years on earth, holds within us gifts to nurture new life. These gifts may be creative - ideas, teaching, counseling, writing or artwork. They may be gifts of time - working for constructive changes in society or volunteering for worthy causes. They may be gifts of the heart – caring for loved ones or teaching our grandchildren.

In giving of ourselves in ways that honor ourselves and those whom we love and serve, we leave in the world a legacy of hope, a commitment to goodness, an insistence on integrity. We affirm Life by sharing with those around us certain convictions - that Life is worth cherishing, that relationships matter, that the earth is sacred, that we define ourselves by what and whom and how deeply we love, and that ultimately we only have God and each other – and that is enough.

Autumn is the time for us to joyfully affirm life. The true power of living lies not in the exuberant fecundity of spring but in the richness of the harvest in the autumn. Playful spring is a time of high hopes, big dreams and grand promises. Purposeful autumn is a time of solid accomplishments and real sustenance.

Granted, there could never be a fruitful autumn without a preceding spring. Still, the potential for the next spring is defined by the accomplishments – the grain harvested and seed stored – of the preceding autumn.

For those of us who have done the decades of marriages and mortgages, kids and careers, and who have sought to spiritually grow through it all, now is our time. Now is the time when our lives and our learning are potentialled for deep fulfillment and glad sharing.

Now is the time for us to know ourselves to be one with God, each of us playing our own role in serving the world, shining with our own brilliant colors – not as a Roman candle blazing briefly before dying out, but as the radiant fulfillment for which the preceding half-century or more has prepared us.

Now is the time for the gift of Life that has evaded us thus far to come full circle and bless us with fulfillment of our life’s purpose. Now – in the autumn of our lives – is the time for affirming Life itself

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