I got up this morning to a windy chilly day and full realization hit that fall has arrived, regardless of what the calendar says.

I headed to the grocery store and along the way I noticed that the trees are starting to turn and the flowers are already starting to hang their pretty heads. The birds are beginning to flock and gather in groups to begin their travels south to a warmer place.

I feel a kind of sadness as I am very much a spring and summer person and the coming of fall always seems to fill me with melancholy feelings. To me fall is an ending of things in a way. The ending of the beauty of flowers and growth and the sweet chitter of little birds and dancing butterflies. 

Soon the ground is to be covered in dead leaves floating everywhere in the cool breezes of fall. The grass will be covered in the mornings with light frost and the air will snap with the chill of oncoming winter. I tend to think that hibernation would be a good idea from about the beginning of October until the beginning of April. :) 

As I travel through the seasons I tend to be reminded that human life is like that. We have seasons in our life and they change so fast. Faster then we realize at times actually. Our birth begins many years of learning and experiencing things for the first time. We go through our youth thinking that life lasts forever. We tend to ignore death and ignore the consequences of our actions in many things.

We hit our mid 20's and realize that we have to work and plan for tomorrow. We believe that we have to prepare now for our old age. Still old age seems forever away when we are in our 20's and 30's. It is nearly inconceivable that we will grow old and become seniors.

By the time we hit our 40's and mid life becomes a reality, we are shocked that we are there and start to wonder where the years went and what we have accomplished. We also start to wonder if we will ever accomplish everything we set out to do before we are too old to enjoy it. Hopefully by then we have learned the rights and wrongs along the way and have chosen the path that we prefer to take.

Hopefully by the time we hit 50 to 60 we have accomplished enough in life to make us content and we can start to enjoy our golden years ahead.  We can then, if we are lucky, look back with pleasant memories and remember the years when we watched our children grow and blossom. The years when we worked long and hard to achieve our goals.

Also hopefully some of us will now retire and start enjoying our grandchildren and giving them more time then we had to give our children growing up because we were so busy working and building our lives. We will putter around our yards doing this and that and we will rattle around our houses doing odds and ends. 

Unless some of us are filthy rich or at least fairly well off, we will find that our lives will not change a lot from how we have lived all along. We will look back over the seasons of our life and we will choose the favorite season. The season where we made the most pleasant memories and the season that stands out most for us. 

I don't know about anyone else, but my season of the most fulfillment began in my late 30's, is continuing on now into my late 40's and will hopefully continue on into my senior years. Along the way in life I learned to accept the things that I could do to make myself a better person and to let go of things that were holding me back from happiness and fulfillment. I now believe I finally have a grip on my life and am trying each day to make my life as calm and peaceful as I can.

We can all look back and say "If I knew then what I know now, things would have been different."  But would they really? Everything we did and everything we went through in each season of our life was for a purpose and as we all we stumbled across along the footpaths there was a reason why we were there. 

Think about it. Think about the seasons of your life. Think about what you know now that you did not know then. Would it have really changed your life?

Until next time....

hugs
Misker 
September 21-2000