For essentially my entire life, I’ve loved the fall. It’s a time when sweaters are finally retrieved from their multi-month-long hibernation, lumpy orange pumpkins and misshapen squash begin dotting the porches of homes and we are gifted with nature’s most anticipated annual exhibition: fall foliage.
Growing up, the fall season meant embarking on scenic detours home from school through hills dressed in bright orange and red. Even now, I find myself setting out on the occasional spontaneous excursion, driving aimlessly through back roads desperately attempting to soak in the wonder that is offered to us during the final few months of the year. After all, the foliage doesn’t last forever. It graces our lives for only a moment, leaving us with brief flashes of awe before it fades away into the stillness of winter.
For so long, the ephemeral character of fall has brought with it a wave of sadness. It is disheartening to wait all year for something so beautiful, only to watch it vanish almost as soon as it arrived. In some ways, the season is melancholy by nature. For a few impertinent weeks, the world feels deeply and authentically alive, exuberating with color, only to conclude in a terrain of barren skeletons. Each glimpse of a vibrant spectacle simultaneously prompts a reminder of the future of desolation that lays in wake.
As a senior, this fall feels especially final. Knowing that this is my last time experiencing fall on campus has made its transient nature feel particularly personal. As I watch this season come to an end, I also feel the weight of accepting the impending conclusion of many other invaluable experiences that college has offered me over the past four years.
Reflecting on all of this has encouraged me to recall concepts I first encountered in Professor Gray’s POL 111 course, which I took during my sophomore year. Years later, I rarely go a day without at some point calling to mind Daoism, an East Asian philosophy that I was first exposed to in that class. The practical applications of this school of thought are abundant. Within Daoism, one can find strategies for reducing stress, embracing simplicity and — relevant to our conversation here — encountering change. Daoism’s cyclical understanding of existence offers us a valuable framework for navigating the conclusion of temporary experiences.
In the Dao De Jing, Lao Tzu writes, “Recognizing beauty as beautiful reveals the ugly; recognizing good as good reveals the bad. Thus, something and nothing produce each other; the difficult and the easy complement each other; the long and the short offset each other; the high and the low incline toward each other; note and sound harmonize with each other; before and after follow each other.”
Put simply, this passage implies that experiencing something requires the experience of nothing. An experience, possession, relationship or time period’s ‘somethingness’ depends on the physical or temporal nothingness that surrounds it. What exists draws its significance from what doesn’t. A mountain is striking only because of the valley that lies beneath it. Without the low, there is no high. It is absence itself that deepens appreciation.
The same is true for fall. Its beauty lies in its brevity. If we lived in an existence devoid of changing seasons, where we stepped outside and perpetually encountered foliage, we would inevitably see it as ordinary. We would be fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the fall’s true richness. It is precisely because fall is temporary that we have the capacity to recognize its value. This same principle extends to everyday experiences: Joy is meaningful because we have known sadness, fulfillment is appreciated because we have felt longing, and the value of our friendships, classes, professors and college lives can be cherished more fully if we are eventually forced to leave them behind.
Absence is not a void but an opportune space to enrich what follows. Rather than seeing this season of transition as one of decay, mourning and perhaps a bit of existential dread, we can choose to view the fall as a time of immense possibility and promise that positions us on a path towards new, exciting experiences. After all, we know of what lies on the horizon.
Without the disappearance of the leaves in the fall, there would never be a spring. While colorless nubs on trees may momentarily replace the vivid display of fall, eventually, all of the arid gaps between branches will reappear. In time, each tree will bud again, coalescing to create a dense array of rich greens. And someday, we will once again feel the familiar crisp breeze of summer’s end. Before we know it, we’re once again greeted by the brightly burning shades of orange and red.
