Last weekend I got to show a 6 year old in Florida their first red tree. I’ve been traveling mostly through New England and the Midwest this fall for speaking gigs. I have collected a lot of pictures on my phone of bright red, orange, and yellow trees. She was born and raised in Florida. She didn’t know the leaves changed color, or at least she didn’t remember seeing a leaf that colorful before. 

She thought a red tree made it magical and I agree. It is kind of mystical that every year the leaves transform from ordinary to remarkable. Their colors inspire delight and attract travelers from around the world after weeks of cold rain. The leaves change right on time without any enforcement at all. 

Everything happens on time. 

Now, I know that’s an overtly optimistic perspective. Look, I am trying it out. I grew up in a family where optimism was rarely found. They genuinely expected the worst to happen and it did. That’s kind of how pessimism works. If you expect the worst, you see what’s going wrong first.

The part that made it particularly toxic is that all of us found a way to make up a formula where bad things were a consequence. Good ol’ Catholic guilt, I guess. In that version of living, it’s really easy to think that any change of direction is simply a consequence of making the wrong decision. You wouldn’t have to change direction if you didn’t make a bad choice in the first place - at least that’s what I told myself when the next inevitable redirection moment came up. 

In all that made up math about why change happened, I subtracted a lot of effortless joy from my life. It doesn’t actually matter why. Even the leaves know that sometimes it’s just time to transform. Not because anything is wrong, but because it’s their season to be remarkable.