What a lovely, whirling, reeling October it has been. I am finding it hard to catch my breath. My staggered presence here has been one result of that, and I have had to accept it without regret. When I list the things our family holds on our plate, both chosen and not chosen, it’s no wonder to me that sometimes this small corner of my writing has to sit quiet.
One reason this season has been so lovely, even as it whirls, is because of the good things that seem to keep coming. While I don’t think that they come as any sort of deserved outcome of something we’ve done, they are just the fruition of a long haul so to speak. I think of raising kids in this category. It’s a journey of long years, many of which are exhausting on every level, and you are always worried about or assessing how you are doing It wrong, or where you (or they) need to grow. And then, suddenly, you are there at what is not the “end” but is a marker of sorts. A grown person is before you, who you rather like, and they are moving into the world in their own way, receiving the outcome (a scholarship!) of their own years of work and diligence, and you burst for them. This is one of the good things.
Another is a kind of peace about change that I never used to have. We are entering into a season of change and transition, and that holds many unknowns and scary things. On some days I have wrestled with doubts and questions, and then, uncharacteristically I have been able to lay it down. And realize my smallness in the world, and how even though I know I matter very much in a particular way to God, I am also not the one on whom it all hinges. I can take myself less seriously, and know that the trajectory of my decisions is both important and not important.
When I look at the years behind us, they appear tumultuous and strained to say the least. In many ways I look at them and see mostly stretching—sometimes literally, as my body expanded again and again to make way for another child—and in other ways the stretching of our faith, our understanding of this place we live in and how to be faithful in it, our role in our work, our relationships, our family life, our schedules, our desires big and small. It has been one long, deep, straining to keep it together. I also look at these years and see (hope?) that the stretching has formed us.
Not that we are done. But it does feel like a new season is upon us. A stretching of a different sort, no doubt, and in new ways. But I know no other way to describe it than to say that in some way, it feels like the release that comes after the burn of an enduring hold, when you push your limbs to an uncomfortable limit and hold yourself in position longer than you thought possible, and then finally let go.
Sometimes we are allowed to let go.
Isn’t that what October is? The season of an aching beauty, watching the leaves in their glorious exit, somehow so grateful for it all even though it means the end.