The Last Leaves Hold the Light: On Change, Timing and Refusing to Be Rushed

There is a temptation to think that by November autumn is almost finished. The clocks have gone back. Darkness arrives indecently early. The glorious theatrical bit of October, when whole trees seem to catch fire overnight, has largely passed. There are leaves blocking drains, leaves plastered wetly across paths and leaves finding their way into places leaves really have no business being. The woodland floor has become a shifting carpet of russet and brown, and the trees themselves are beginning to show their bones. And yet November can produce some of the most beautiful colour of the year.

The beech and oak haven't necessarily finished with autumn just because the calendar says they should have. Their leaves can hang on surprisingly late, particularly in sheltered parts of the woods, turning from gold to copper and then into the deep burnished browns that seem almost illuminated when the low November sun catches them. On bright days, against a properly blue sky, they can be magnificent. On damp mornings the effect is completely different: softer, muted, the colours deepening beneath mist and drizzle. Then a storm blows through overnight and half of it is gone by morning. I love the unpredictability of this part of the year. Perhaps because it refuses the tidy version of seasonal change we carry in our heads.

There isn't a meeting in the woods on 1 November where everybody agrees it is time to move on. One tree stands almost bare while another, only a few metres away, is still carrying a surprising amount of its summer canopy. The young beeches sometimes cling onto their leaves long after the larger trees around them have let theirs fall. At the woodland edge the weather gets its way more quickly, while in protected hollows autumn seems to linger. The whole wood is changing, but it isn't changing at the same speed. We aren't particularly good at allowing ourselves the same freedom.

There is a quiet expectation in our culture that change should happen in an orderly sequence. Something happens, we process it, learn from it and move forward. If we've chosen the change ourselves, we're expected to be excited about it. If we haven't, there seems to be an unofficial period during which sadness, anger or disorientation are acceptable before someone begins wondering whether perhaps we should be “moving on”. Even the language gives us away.

Have you got over it?

Are you feeling more like yourself?

What's next?

Usually asked with kindness. Often received as pressure. Real change is rarely that cooperative.

A relationship can end long before we stop loving somebody. We can leave a job we desperately needed to leave and still grieve the person we were when we worked there. A child becoming independent can be exactly what we hoped for and leave an unexpected emptiness behind. A diagnosis can bring relief and anger in almost equal measure. Recovery can involve missing the very thing that was destroying us. Estrangement can bring safety without bringing peace. Human beings are inconveniently capable of holding apparently contradictory truths at the same time. Perhaps that is why I distrust the idea of closure. It sounds so satisfyingly complete.

Door shut. Chapter finished. Lesson learned.......Life rarely behaves like that.

Sometimes the door remains slightly open. Sometimes we walk back through it in our minds years later. Sometimes something we thought we'd dealt with returns because we've reached a different age, another relationship or a new understanding of ourselves, and suddenly there is more to know.

That doesn't mean the original work failed. It means we're alive.

The woodland makes this visible everywhere in November. The season isn't progressing along one clean line from summer to winter. Different species respond differently to temperature and light. Different trees, and even different parts of the same tree, change at their own pace. Some leaves fall while they are still yellow. Others remain attached until they are brittle and brown. Ivy is doing something else entirely. While much of the woodland is withdrawing, ivy is flowering, its small greenish blooms providing one of the last significant sources of nectar for insects preparing for winter.

There is no single correct response to November. There is simply relationship with conditions. I think about this often when people tell me they should be further along. It might be grief......Burnout... Recovery from trauma.......A relationship breakdown......Learning that their brain works differently from the way they had understood it for forty or fifty years.......Trying to rebuild a life after addiction......Sometimes the sentence is almost apologetic.

I thought I'd be better by now.

I understand the longing beneath it. When something hurts, of course we want the hurting to end. When we've worked hard to change something, of course we want evidence that the work is paying off. But I wonder where we learned that healing should run to schedule. Certainly not from anything alive. One of the things I've learned from working with people for many years is that progress is remarkably difficult to judge from inside it. We tend to look for dramatic evidence: the anxiety disappearing, the confidence arriving, the relationship finally feeling easy, the old behaviour never happening again. Often the real changes are much less impressive. Someone notices they're anxious before anxiety has completely taken over.

They say no and spend two hours feeling guilty instead of two days.

They recognise the familiar urge to rescue somebody and don't immediately act on it.

They drink less.

They rest before exhaustion makes the decision for them.

They recover more quickly after something knocks them sideways.

None of it feels particularly cinematic......It is still change. And sometimes there are periods when apparently nothing changes at all. Those can be the hardest to trust.

We are so accustomed to measuring progress through visible movement that stillness can feel suspicious. We begin wondering whether we've become stuck. Whether we're avoiding something. Whether everybody else is somehow getting on with life while we're standing in the same place.

Occasionally, of course, we are stuck. There are times when we need help to understand why the same patterns keep repeating, or why knowing something intellectually has made surprisingly little difference to how we actually live.

But not all stillness is stuckness.

• Sometimes we're integrating.

• Sometimes we're exhausted.

• Sometimes the next thing hasn't become clear yet.

• Sometimes we're simply not ready.

Brené Brown has written extensively about our discomfort with vulnerability and uncertainty, and I think our impatience with change belongs somewhere in that territory. Certainty is seductive. If we can create a timeline for recovery, grief, therapy or reinvention, perhaps we can protect ourselves from the much more difficult truth that some things cannot be controlled into resolution.

We can influence them.

Tend them.

Attend to them.

Make choices within them.

But we cannot always determine their season. There is humility in recognising that. The woodland certainly doesn't confuse patience with passivity.

November is busy. Crows gather in increasingly large numbers, their calls carrying above the trees as they come together to roost. Tawny owls become more vocal as courtship begins. Late-flying insects crowd around flowering ivy. Coppicing starts again, and somewhere in the distance there may be the sound of saws or splitting wood. Logs cut now will be stacked and left to season, perhaps for a year or more, before anyone expects them to provide warmth. That last part feels important.......We understand instinctively that green wood cannot be hurried into good firewood.

We stack it......Protect it......Give it air.......And wait.

We don't stand beside the woodpile in February shouting encouragement.

We trust the process because we understand something about wood.

Perhaps we might extend a little of that intelligence towards ourselves.

Not infinite patience with things that need changing. Not resignation. And certainly not the idea that suffering should simply be endured because “everything happens in its own time”.

Rather, a more discerning question.

What does this particular change need?

• Perhaps it needs action.

• Perhaps support.

• Perhaps a difficult conversation.

• Perhaps a boundary.

• Perhaps grief.

• Perhaps treatment.

• Perhaps practice.

• Perhaps rest.

• Perhaps simply more time than we wanted it to take.

Walking through the woods in November, the differences between the trees become increasingly obvious. One has surrendered almost everything. Another is still blazing copper in the afternoon light. Neither appears concerned about what the other is doing. And neither is behind. By winter they will both be bare. But they will have arrived there in their own way. There is something deeply reassuring in that. Not because nature provides us with easy answers. It doesn't. But because it continually reminds us that variation isn't failure.

• We don't all recover at the same speed.

• We don't grieve on schedule.

• We don't understand ourselves all at once.

• We don't become ready simply because somebody else thinks enough time has passed.

Sometimes the last leaves hold on. And while they're there, November light catches them in a way October never could. Perhaps there are things we only get to see because we didn't rush the season. Perhaps that is worth remembering the next time we find ourselves thinking:

I should be further along by now.

Further according to whom? The woods have never asked.

They are simply getting on with the complicated, beautiful business of becoming winter.