9 Lessons from Fall: Embracing Seasons of Change

Fall is ridiculously easy to romanticize. The sweaters, the coffee, the leaves, the candles we apparently all agreed need to smell like baked goods. I love all of it.

But there’s something else I love about fall: it’s hard not to notice it.

One day everything is green, and then suddenly it isn’t. The light changes, the mornings get colder, and the sun starts disappearing before you’re ready for it.

There’s something refreshing about a season that demands to be noticed, especially when so much of modern life is designed to pull our attention somewhere else. We notice the notification, the email, the thing someone posted, the thing we need to do next. Meanwhile, an entire season is changing outside.

Maybe that’s why fall has always felt like more than a change in weather. It’s a reminder to pay attention to where we are before we rush toward where we’re going next.

Here are nine things fall keeps reminding me.

1. Pay Attention While It’s Here

There are only so many fall mornings. That’s partly why we love them. We know the leaves won’t stay that color, the weather will change, and eventually fall will become winter.

Knowing something won’t last has a way of making us pay attention to it. Strangely, we don’t always apply that same logic to our lives.

An ordinary Tuesday morning doesn’t feel particularly important. Neither does walking the dog, having coffee with someone you love, sitting outside for ten minutes, or driving somewhere with the windows down. These moments are easy to overlook because we assume there will always be another one.

Until there isn’t.

We spend a lot of our lives waiting for the moments we think will matter—the vacation, the promotion, the celebration, the big milestone. But a life is mostly made up of everything that happens in between. Fall reminds me that something doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be worth noticing.

2. Let Something Go

There’s an obvious metaphor here. Trees let go of their leaves every fall, and we can learn to let go, too. It’s probably been printed on approximately four million inspirational mugs.

But clichés usually become clichés because there’s some truth underneath them.

We carry an incredible amount without stopping to ask whether we still want to carry it. Obligations we agreed to years ago. Expectations about who we’re supposed to be. Routines that made sense for an earlier version of our lives. Even digital habits can fall into this category. We open the same apps, check the same things, and follow the same routines because we’ve done them hundreds of times before.

So maybe the useful question isn’t simply, What should I let go of? It’s: What am I still doing simply because I’ve gotten used to doing it?

Not everything needs to come with us into the next season.

3. Stop Filling Every Empty Minute

Think about the last time you had three completely unoccupied minutes. Maybe you were waiting for coffee, standing in line, sitting in the car before an appointment, or waiting for someone to meet you.

What did you do?

If you’re anything like me, there’s a decent chance you reached for your phone.

We’ve become remarkably good at eliminating empty space. There’s always something available to fill it: a podcast, a text, an email, a video, a game, an entire internet’s worth of things we didn’t know existed five seconds ago.

I’m not convinced that’s entirely a good thing.

Boredom gives our minds somewhere to go. It gives us time to notice our surroundings, process what happened earlier, follow a strange thought, or simply exist without consuming something. When every pause gets filled, we lose some of that.

This fall, try leaving a few of those little spaces alone. Drink the coffee without simultaneously reading something. Take the walk without filling your ears. Sit outside for ten minutes without finding a way to make those ten minutes productive.

See what shows up when nothing else does.

4. Stop Treating Today Like a Waiting Room

I’ve caught myself doing this more times than I’d like to admit.

Get through this week. Make it to the weekend. Finish this project. Take the trip. Reach the goal. Then I’ll slow down. Then things will settle. Then I’ll really enjoy myself.

Except “next” has a funny way of becoming something else the second we get there.

There’s nothing wrong with anticipation. Looking forward to things is one of the great pleasures of being alive. The problem comes when we become so oriented toward the next thing that the life we’re living right now starts to feel like the waiting room.

Seasons make that especially obvious. If you spend October waiting for December, October still passes. You just weren’t really there for it.

The same is true of our lives. There will always be something next. This part counts, too.

5. You Don’t Have to Optimize Fall

Every fall, the lists arrive. The best places to see foliage. The books you have to read. The recipes you have to make. The trips you should take. The 27 things you apparently need to accomplish before November 30 or risk having experienced autumn incorrectly.

I love a fall bucket list as much as anyone. But sometimes even leisure starts to feel suspiciously like work.

We’ve gotten very good at optimizing our lives. We track our sleep, steps, workouts, productivity, habits, reading, screen time, and sometimes even our relaxation. There’s always a better morning routine to try or a more efficient version of ourselves waiting just beyond the next system.

Fall doesn’t need to become another project.

You don’t have to maximize every weekend. You don’t need to become a better person before winter.

Sometimes you can just drink the cider.

6. Your Attention Is Still Yours

There are a lot of things competing for our attention: apps, notifications, emails, news, advertising, other people’s opinions, and the little red circle telling us that somewhere, something has happened and apparently we need to know about it immediately.

We can’t eliminate all of that, and I don’t think we need to.

The question I’m much more interested in is whether we recognize when we’re making a choice.

One of the questions at the heart of my work is: Did I choose this, or was it chosen for me?

It’s a surprisingly useful question when you realize you’ve been scrolling for twenty minutes, when you pick up your phone in the middle of a conversation, or when you’re checking something for the sixth time even though you know nothing has changed.

Sometimes the answer will be, Yes, I chose this, and I’m having a great time.

Great. Keep going.

The goal isn’t to make the “right” choice every time. It’s to realize you have one.

7. Take the Picture. Then Experience the Moment.

Fall is extremely photogenic, and I’m not going to tell you not to take the picture. I have approximately 900 photos of things that looked pretty and absolutely no moral high ground here.

Technology isn’t the enemy of presence. Taking a picture can actually make us notice something we might otherwise have walked past.

The problem is what sometimes happens next.

We take the photo, edit the photo, post the photo, check who liked the photo, respond to something else while we’re there, and suddenly we’ve left the very moment we were trying to preserve.

So take the picture. Take five if you want.

Then put the phone back in your pocket and look at the thing you thought was beautiful enough to photograph in the first place.

Some moments don’t need to become anything else.

8. Let Yourself Change

Fall is transformation happening in plain sight. Nothing about the landscape looks particularly concerned that it doesn’t look the way it did three months ago.

Humans have a harder time with that.

We build identities around who we are, what we do, what we’re good at, and what we thought our lives would look like. Then something changes, and we can spend an enormous amount of energy trying to get back to an old version of ourselves.

But we’re allowed to outgrow things. We’re allowed to decide something isn’t working anymore. We’re allowed to want something different than we wanted six months ago.

Change doesn’t always mean adding another goal, habit, or accomplishment. Sometimes it means recognizing that something no longer fits and giving ourselves permission to choose differently.

9. Look Up

This may be the simplest lesson fall has to offer.

Look up.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Look at the leaves. Notice how early the light starts changing. Watch your dog investigate something that is apparently the most fascinating smell ever encountered. Pay attention to the person sitting across from you. Taste the first sip of coffee instead of drinking it while reading an email.

None of these moments will change your life.

They are your life.

That distinction matters to me.

Fall is going to happen whether we pay attention to it or not. So will an enormous amount of our lives. We don’t need to turn every ordinary moment into something profound, but I also don’t want to spend my life waiting for extraordinary moments while scrolling through all the ordinary ones.

I want to be here for them.

Reclaim More of Your Life

That desire—to be here for our own lives—is a big part of why I wrote Reclaim: How to Stop Scrolling Through Your Life and Start Living It.

I don’t believe the answer is throwing away our phones, deleting every app, or pretending technology hasn’t made our lives better in countless ways. I like technology. I’ve also experienced how easy it is to pick up a phone for one thing and surface twenty minutes later somewhere I never intended to be.

Reclaim is about understanding what happens in that space.

It explores why our attention is so easy to capture, how unconscious digital habits become part of everyday life, and what we can do to bring more choice back into our relationship with technology. Not because we need to become perfect digital citizens, but because our attention determines an enormous amount of what we actually experience.

And I want more of that attention going toward the life I chose.

If you do too, Reclaim is available on Amazon.

Get Reclaim: How to Stop Scrolling Through Your Life and Start Living It on Amazon.

Be well,

Heather