To Everything There is a Season: The Wisdom of Living With Change
By Joree Rose, LMFT
There is something that happens in autumn that I find quietly instructive. The trees don’t fight the change. They don’t hold desperately to their leaves, trying to maintain the fullness of summer past its time. They release — and in releasing, they become something else entirely. Something that in its own way is just as beautiful.
I think about this a lot in my work with people navigating transitions. How much of our suffering comes not from the transition itself but from the resistance to it — the white-knuckled holding on to what was, the refusal to let the season change.
To everything there is a season. It’s one of those truths so old and so often quoted that it can lose its weight. But sit with it for a moment. To everything. Not just the comfortable things. Not just the transitions you chose and prepared for. Everything.
The Seasons We Welcome and the Ones We Don’t
Some seasons we welcome. The arrival of something longed for — a relationship, a child, a new chapter of work, a hard-earned period of rest. We move into these seasons with openness and gratitude and the pleasure of anticipation becoming reality.
Other seasons arrive uninvited. Grief. Illness. The end of something we thought would last. The particular disorientation of a life that no longer matches the map we were using to navigate it. These seasons we resist. We argue with reality. We bargain and grieve and try to hold on to what’s already gone.
The resistance is human. It is not wrong. It is worth understanding.
We resist change most when our identity is bound up in what’s changing. When the role that’s ending — mother of young children, person in that relationship, holder of that career — has been central to our sense of self. When we don’t yet know who we are without it.
This is why transitions are so often identity crises in disguise. The outer change triggers an inner question: who am I now? And that question, if we’re willing to sit with it, leads somewhere important.
What Each Season Offers
Spring in a life — beginnings, new growth, possibility — asks for openness and courage. The willingness to start before you’re certain, to step toward something before you can see the whole path.
Summer — fullness, productivity, the season of doing and building — asks for presence. To actually inhabit the life you’ve worked for rather than always straining toward the next thing.
Autumn — the season of release, of letting things end, of recognizing what has run its course — asks for surrender. Not defeat, but the mature willingness to let go of what’s finished. To trust that the releasing makes room for what comes next.
Winter — the fallow season, the quiet, the time of rest and gestation — is the one we’re least comfortable with. We pathologize winter. We treat it as depression, stagnation, failure. But winter is not nothing. It is the season in which the roots deepen. In which things grow in the dark. In which what has been shed begins, invisibly, to become something new.
If you’re in a winter — a quiet season, a slow season, a season that doesn’t look like progress — I want to offer the possibility that you are not stuck. You may be in preparation.
Living With the Seasons Rather Than Against Them
The trees don’t extend summer by holding their leaves. The seasons change whether we’re ready or not. What we have some influence over is not the season itself but our relationship to it — how we meet it, what we make of it, whether we spend it fighting reality or finding our footing within it.
Mindfulness — the practice of being present with what is, rather than what was or what we wish were true — is the most direct path I know to living with the seasons rather than against them. Not acceptance as passive resignation, but acceptance as active engagement with reality. Being here, in this season, as it actually is.
And trust — earned through experience and chosen through practice — that the season will change. That it always does. That what feels permanent in the middle of it rarely is.
The leaves fall. The roots hold. Spring comes.
If you’re navigating a significant life transition and looking for support in finding your footing, schedule a free consultation to learn more about individual therapy.
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