Navigating Life’s Changing Seasons

Rebecca Bayuk

Rebecca Bayuk is an editor, writer and classic movies fan who is partial to poetry, animals, and kitchen discos (she continues to extend an open invitation to her two cats, despite their distinct lack of enthusiasm). She is originally from Brontë country in Yorkshire, England, but now lives with her husband just outside Washington DC. You can find her over at rebeccabayuk.com, or pootling around Instagram: @rebeccabayuk.

My husband and I are spending a week by Lake Keuka in Upstate New York. Summer’s officially over; adjacent holiday lets are deserted. It suits us perfectly: we want somewhere away from the city, someplace quiet. 

I’m up early most days. I creep as quietly as I can over creaking floorboards towards the lake-facing sitting room, flanked on three sides by windows, and watch the water.

Some mornings the lake’s like white glass, dazzling with light. Other days it’s shrouded in a thin grey mist that occasionally thickens violently, rendering the shore opposite invisible. One afternoon, as we debate taking a dip, a great swollen dark bruising of cloud rolls over the water in mere minutes, churning up the previously mirror-like surface into white-tipped peaks which break against the jetty loudly enough to hear inside. 

That week it’s not only the lake that shifts and changes. The trees either side of the water ripple into autumn, blazing splashes of russet and orange through the green. The air cools. I’m glad for the thick socks I packed. When we venture into a nearby town, locals have strung up garlands of fabric leaves and arranged squashes and gourds on porch steps to celebrate the new season. Seeing this I’m reminded of the respect we instinctively hold for these changes of state, the passing of time, within nature: nobody begrudges the lake her continual reinvention, even if it means waiting to swim or take out the boat; no one rails against the trees when their leaves first blaze into color and then scatter away. We understand that this is the natural order of things. We know the seasons change. We carry the impermanence of nature lightly and without thinking, the way we do our bones.

I’m thinking a lot about change. Before the year’s end we’ll have a child; I am, frankly, terrified, consumed with all the ways I can fail, with who and how I will be meeting this challenge. It strikes me that whilst I can embrace the changes happening around me in the natural world, I struggle to bring the same sense of acceptance– of anything like acceptance– to this situation. 

I know I’m not alone in this: pregnancy forums are full of women grappling equally with the changes motherhood brings and the toxic belief– still sadly prevalent, albeit sneakily– that to express anything other than joy in response makes you ungrateful, uncaring.

Moreover, our responses to other life changes are framed as almost unnatural, something to feel ashamed of. Concern over aging– particularly in a female body– is often dismissed as frivolous, and yet, you only have to look at the mass of products we’re daily bombarded with– all promising to fight aging as if it’s a battle to be won– or the casting of Hollywood films, or the myriad other ways in which western culture worships youth, to understand that there is a societal cost to aging, that we don’t grant the same grace to our changing bodies as we do the changing seasons outside– but voice this and you risk being deemed shallow. There’s no space, it seems, for conflicted feelings.

I remember a friend, reflecting on the end of a decade-long relationship, remarking that one of the worst parts was feeling that she’d wasted her time, as if the coupling, and all it’d brought her in terms of happiness and experience, was ultimately for naught, given it had not lasted forever. It seems so many life seasons– leaving home, entering or exiting a relationship, becoming a parent (or not, by choice or otherwise), career changes, dealing with illness, loss, and grief, even simply inhabiting our own aging bodies– are challenging not only because of the associated practical changes and emotional turbulence they bring but because of the threat they pose to some internal desire for certainty measured only via longevity. 

Impermanence is a frightening prospect for so many of us because it underscores how little control we ultimately have. We like to think that once we have achieved X, we will feel Y, and proceed faultlessly thereafter. Accordingly we assign value to permanence, even as we readily applaud the very opposite in nature. We decide that specific (and narrow) achievements are wholly indicative of our progress and our worth. We look for mythical junctures at which we will have cemented our identities, as if our inner selves are objects that can be fixed in place, like butterflies pinned to some collector’s board. To admit that our circumstances, feelings, and opinions can be complex, can change entirely, or that we can make mistakes even after ‘getting things right’ previously, or that our identities might at different times shift and flex like reeds in the wind– it’s scary. How can we feel safe when nothing is fixed, nothing guaranteed?

There’s no easy answer, but I think it would benefit us all to take fewer cues from societal shoulds, social media, or marketing campaigns, and instead strive to observe the changing seasons of our lives in the way we watch summer blaze into fall, or spring blossom from winter– without judgment or rush to action, with acceptance, with a celebration of the uniqueness, the worth, of each new stage over fruitless yearning for some other time. After all: there’s beauty and value in even the hardest seasons of our lives, if we can accept that suffering is as much a part of life as any positive emotion, if we can accept change as the only constant, if we can accept that all things– both good and bad– eventually pass, if we can try to appreciate rather than resist.

As I write the leaves are uniformly crimson. Nights are drawing in; mornings are dark and cold. It won’t be long before the trees are entirely bare, before the baby’s here, before a new season begins. 

I’m waiting to see what it brings.