Autumn is my favourite colour.
I love autumn. The temperature, the colours, the cosy feeling.
I love how things start to change from blistering heat to gentler temperatures. I love jumpers, hot water bottles, hot chocolate, the warm fire and the cold sea water. Crisp air and soft blankets. The beautiful colours before the vastness of empty leaves and harsh cold that winter can bring.
Autumn is my favourite. It’s warm and soft and kind.
BUT - change is hard. Going from six weeks at home with the girls, waking when we want to, making our own flow and rhythm, taking the day as we want it to school runs, breakfast battles, uniform tussles - it’s a hard leap. And I can struggle with it.
I struggle with it the other way too, from the nice plod of routine to the less structured holidays - I can find that hard too.
Until I remind myself that we are always changing, daily. Always growing and learning, always moving from one state to another. We just rarely take the time to stop and notice it. The change happens every single moment of our lives. Sometimes the change is subtle, other times we can notice it and it hits us nicely.
I spoke with a friend recently about taking holidays with other families - every family has it’s rhythms, and it’s ways. Every parent has their way of parenting, and sometimes seeing how others parent can trigger us - we can label others as wrong, or bad, or right and good. We label with ease, without thinking about the nuances of what parenting is. And I realised that 30 year old me couldn’t holiday with other people without arguments - but 41 year old me could - because I have learned ways of accepting, being and enjoying myself and others without my ego or frustrations being a part of it. And that felt big. Realising I had changed without noticing that change.
And that’s a part of mindfulness - noticing the now.
I was feeling touched out earlier this week, noting too major but enough to not feel grounded or connected with myself in the way I like, so on my walk I made a point of noticing things. The bushes, the sounds, the feel of my feet in my shoes. It helped ground me a lot, helped take me back to the moment instead of rushing in my mind to the future.
It really helped but I also noted that it wouldn’t really help me if I were really stressed, or heavily anxious. Using mindfulness practices are great for the smaller difficult to process feelings, rather than the bigger ones - and maybe there was something missing.
Feeling a little anxious, stressed - we know what to do if we’re at the start of these feelings. There is a lot of help out there for this. When we get to the point of serious mental illness - there is a lot of help there for that.
There needs to be some support from Summer to winter. Maybe we’re missing out on the autumn of feelings.
And that’s where you find me. Between summer and winter of feelings. Helping you with the middle change.
The below is from a BBC article on change and I really liked it -
“Life is flux,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. The Greek philosopher pointed out in 500 BC that everything is constantly shifting, and becoming something other to what it was before. Like a river, life flows ever onwards, and while we may step from the riverbank into the river, the waters flowing over our feet will never be the same waters that flowed even one moment before. Heraclitus concluded that since the very nature of life is change, to resist this natural flow was to resist the very essence of our existence. “There is nothing permanent except change,” he said.
Until next time - L xx
