There is a lot on New Hampshire’s collective mind these days – a nasty Supreme Court fight, a widening political divide, and talk of blue waves and red walls. Candidates in races big and small – but all of them important – are loudly vying for your attention and your vote next month. More pressing, there’s wood to stack, children to shuttle, errands to run, deadlines to meet and bills to pay.
It’s a mad time, and the trees alone seem unperturbed. They are trading in their greens for golds, right on schedule, as if the troubles of the bustling throngs don’t matter even a little bit.
Over the next couple of weeks, the people of New Hampshire and their out-of-state visitors will approach autumn appreciation as something of a duty. They will deplete every last apple tree of its treasure, search through bins and patches for the perfect pumpkin, rubber-neck their way along the Kancamagus, happily stumble upon the Warner Fall Foliage Festival, and labor up hills and small mountains in search of the perfect view. They will post their postcard-worthy photos of old white churches and older valleys to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, hashtag “Blessed.” They will say how stunning New Hampshire looks in October, because it does, and then they will go home to await inevitable, interminable winter.
Away from the rituals and traditions, those who live each of their days amid all of this beauty will grow numb to it. You will, too – you always do.
And then one day you will find yourself on a road you travel almost every day, thinking about something you must do or should have done, or some person who wronged you or you have wronged. You will be so deep inside your own head, as you usually are, that you will fail to notice the scenery you are driving toward, through and past. The unceasing internal dialogue that afflicts every human being is not only deafening, it is blinding, and so miles and miles of perfection will fall away, unnoticed and unloved, before the universe snaps its fingers to awaken the sleepwalker. At first, all you see is a shaft of sunlight boring a hole through a wall of dense clouds – and that is striking enough. But then you follow the beam down to Earth, to a stand of sugar maples in which every leaf is a little too red, a little too orange, a little too gold. It’s a trick of light or God; these colors don’t exist in nature. But you know that they do, because you see them every year – usually when you are not looking for them, when you are not looking for anything.
Plans are made and destinations sought, but a flash of grace amid everyday despair cannot be scheduled or duplicated. Such moments may be fleeting, but they are never trivial.
In the time between the writing of these words yesterday and the reading of them today, the world will have changed in innumerable ways. There will be new villains and heroes, new things to celebrate or worry about, new responsibilities and commitments, new lives and deaths. If autumn reminds us of nothing else, it’s that the only permanent thing in this world is impermanence. Seed to sprout, green to gold, the fall to nothingness. The cycle repeats, and nature doesn’t resist.
It’s as if the tree knows what people don’t – that when you cling too tightly to what cannot be kept, what was never meant to be kept, all you can feel is the tension of your grip. Soon enough, you’ve forgotten the reason why you held on in the first place.