As you may have noticed, Autumn is here. Some people think it’s a melancholy thing; I must admit I find it stimulating, poetic, exciting, full of colours – the challenging weather, the rustle of leaves, the promise of new beginnings. Classic autumn signs; the spectacular, bright, flaming reds, russets, bronzes and golds, the stark, bare branches where once there was vibrant green. It’s fascinating to watch a leaf, grown into its place, thriving there all its life, until suddenly it becomes mobile, fluttering agitatedly in every gust of wind.
How does it happen?
Wondering how all this worked, I checked Wikipedia, which mentions seasonally restricted supplies of a hormone, auxin, at what’s called the ‘abscission‘ zone’ at the base of the leaf-stem. Apparently auxin depletion makes these cells susceptible to ethylene; eventually they disintegrate, causing the leaf to loosen and fall. This is a crucial survival tactic for the tree, reducing surface area and wind resistance in heavy weather, and saving energy consumption. Abscission, the shedding of leaves, is not intrinsically melancholy, just standard procedure. Yet still, there’s an ending there somehow, the closing of a life phase.
Small pink people blowing bubbles
Coming back across the park today, busy with these thoughts, I saw a young mother with two small girls muffled up in warm pink jackets. The elder sister had a plastic tube of soapy stuff – she dipped a sort of wand into it, then waved it about in the wind, and suddenly the park was full of big, beautiful, polychromatic bubbles, dancing wildly through the air until they burst. This was repeated many times, amid wild excitement; everyone who was nearby stopped to enjoy the sight. I found it a poetic image – these two tiny beings, at the beginning of their lives, filling their world with brightness, movement and laughter, using nothing more than bubbles. The contrast with the almost ceremonial character of the autumn treescape was marked. I realised that the power of the image lay in the fact that bubbles burst. They whizz by and are gone, leaving us behind. Little beautiful people grow up, and time, famously, changes everything.
The time of our lives
Time is weird. One school of thought says it’s not real, we just think it is. Apparently, our idea of time is connected with how we see objective reality, whether we’re convinced there’s a concrete, factual ‘out-there’ truth, or just an illusion which we ourselves construct. This discussion can get pretty complex, maybe taking us deeper down that rabbit-hole than we need to go just now.
Anyhow, with luck, those small pink people will get bigger, living their own seasons, from very young to very old (trust me on the last bit). Bubbles go where bubbles go, and children morph, very quickly, through adolescence, adulthood (perhaps parenthood), into middle age and antiquity. I really hope they meet affection and respect along their way. Much about this is beautiful, but there is also a melancholy in the inevitable partings, the never-to-be-repeated images. A slight sadness, you might say, not unlike leaf abscission.
Fallen
Here is a different sadness, of which I learned a few days ago. An old man was walking home through Islington, when three teenage girls got off a bus in front of him. They were quite young – one was 17, one was 16, and the youngest just 14. At 75, he could easily have been their great-grandfather, perhaps the kind who would take them out, on a windy day, to blow bubbles in the park, and delight passers-by with their innocent joy in being alive.
At first, on CCTV, they look like any normal adolescents, until you clock the body language. They used their phones to film the old man, and they beat to him to death. He was a harmless person, a Buddhist, reportedly a kind, gentle man. They pushed him, punched him, knocked him down, kicked him, and left him on the pavement in his own blood. He died of cardiac arrest. This should make us stop and think. Many sad things happen in the world – more numerous than before, perhaps, or maybe we just hear more about them now. Either way, the death of innocence is tragic, and outrageous.
Fall from grace
I know nothing of these girls, neither who they were, nor why they did what they did. There is an immeasurable sadness here. Sadness for the innocent man and his family, and the people who knew him. Sadness for the mindless savagery of the girls, now serving sentences of between two-and -a-half and four years; their lives are changed forever and there will, I think, be more sadness for them yet. Sadness for this incomprehensible reality: that even people who become, inconceivably, the killers of innocence, may once have been small persons, playing in the park in a bright glory of Autumn leaves.
The question
How do we deal with this? Is there an answer? Can it even exist? I think it can, and I hope I’m right – it’s the best I can come up with for now.
We can put this imbalance right, if we work at it. We need to become better at love. We need to love ourselves and each other, much more consistently. We need to love small children, and very old people, and off-putting people, and people we don’t like (but could, if we put our minds to it) and everyone in between. We need to forgive, to give people the benefit of the doubt, to look after folk who are in a worse state than we are. We need to take trouble over things we do, to do them as well (and lovingly) as possible. We need to spurn the shortcut, the quick buck, the easy cheat, the instant gratification. We need proactively to love the planet upon which we live, and we need to treat it much, much better, starting today. We need to love the moments and seasons of our lives. We need to make a welcome for the traveller and the homecomer. We need to realise how extraordinarily lucky we are to be alive at all – most people aren’t.
Light in the dark
There’s a little bug you may know, Lampyris noctiluca, the firefly. Like many people I find them festive and joyful. Their optimistic little flicker sparkles through summer nights, a Christmas party enjoying itself too much to stop. They party for all they’re worth, for as long as they can, which in their case means 61 days, after which their party’s over. It didn’t last long but, while they were here, they made the world brighter, and people happier.
We’re not always going to be here, either. Like Autumn leaves, developing through our seasons, changing, falling – each of us will one day know our moment of abscission. (How you feel about that depends on stuff I won’t unpack here).
What could be good, though, abscission-wise, would be to think as we fell, “I did everything I could to make the world brighter”. We could actually do this, separately, and all together. All we need is … (well, you know the song).
