An entirely new landscape

October 8, 2023

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

—Mark Twain

Sometimes the season beautifully reflects our inner landscape. This past week in the Northeast it’s been a glorious Indian summer, complete with majestic red maples and candy-colored orange oak leaves. Sort of like fall, sort of like summer, and at moments we taste November on the chilly mornings.

A little unsettling and exciting all at once…is it sweater weather or should we go back into the lake for one last swim? We humans like predictability in our seasons and spring and fall are always rife with nature’s chaotic march.

I don’t know about you, but I am very much on the precipice of what feels like an entirely new landscape—a new set of possibilities, resources, ways to see the world and everyone in it. The back-and-forth new season is mirroring my own back-and-forthness about whatever the new landscape holds. The unpredictable.

Yes, the change of season helps to reveal this new inner landscape. It’s disrupting and disruption can initiate a change in priorities and patterns. Yet it’s the change we initiate by consciously moving key areas of life forward that can make us feel we are on unsteady ground.

I’m nervous about the beautiful way my kitchen is going to look with the snazzier cabinet doors I’ve just ordered. And I’m nervous about initiating conversations with a new set of colleagues I have invited into my life. I’m also nervous about all of those adventures, people to see, and creative projects that were put on hold due to Covid, because now I have no excuse to not do them.

But most of all, I’m nervous about getting used to the idea of an abiding, rock solid, steady and liberated sense of faith—to live no longer second-guessing the great mystery. To trust life at this very elemental level. Whatever it brings. That’s really the new landscape that scratching at my door. Perhaps there’s no reason to be nervous about any of it. At all.

Will I open the door wide to step out into the new landscape? How about you? Are new possibilities, contacts, opportunities beckoning in ways that make you nervous? Do you notice the impulse to stay safe and stuck despite all the good that’s calling you?

There’s no doubt that I will face my fear and embrace the new landscape even if it causes discomfort. That’s how I tend to roll. I fight change, but then I go passionately into it. And it’s okay to hesitate a bit. Hesitation is how we grieve the old landscape, and if I’m true to my word, we always grieve when we change.

The season is changing and so are we. It’s thrilling to find ourselves in the doorway to an entirely new landscape even if it rocks our world a little bit.

🍁