What if your most meaningful life turns come not from deliberate planting, but from scattering seeds inadvertently?
Often, we refer to autumn as the season of letting go, of a slow decay towards winter’s death. As we watch the days grow shorter and the leaves fall from the trees, we talk about wrapping up existing projects and preparing for a season of rest and hibernation.
Yet autumn is not only a time for release. It is also a time for scattering seeds. I’ve been reading Parker Palmer’s extraordinary book Let Your Life Speak. In it, he writes:
Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring – and scatters them with amazing abandon.
In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die. My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life.
But as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances – on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of work. And yet if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come.
I like this idea that, unlike how gardeners deliberately plant and nurture seeds in the spring, nature “scatters the seeds with amazing abandon.” Done in this manner, it’s just a natural part of the process, no extra effort required.
I often find that some of the most meaningful “turns of events” in my life blossom from seeds that I scattered inadvertently. A person I met on a learning program may now become a business partner. A casual conversation with a client turned into a new connection for my husband. Even this weekly Friday Pause practice grew from a single off-the-cuff LinkedIn post.
I’m not suggesting that there is anything active to do right now. But as we enter into the last month of autumn for this year – and indeed, as it sometimes feel like we are in an autumnal cycle for society at a more meta-level – perhaps it is a good time to pause and remind ourselves that new seeds are being scattered, even as other events in our lives draw to their natural conclusions. And at some point in the future, maybe when we least expect it, they will suddenly, amazingly, burst into bloom.
