I was cleaning out some of my old blogs last night & came across one from 2017 that resonated with much of what I see happening around us today.
And it reminded me of something wonderful.
How much nature can teach us about life, if only we take the time to look.
I was sitting on my front porch in Sydney, savouring my first coffee of the day. It was the beginning of autumn & I was looking across at two magnificent Liquid Ambers that were both a source of joy & despair.
Joy because they were beautiful trees. Despair because they were enormous & I knew I would soon be spending hours raking up their leaves.
But those two trees had taught me something far more important than the inconvenience of autumn gardening.
I recalled sitting in precisely the same spot a year earlier, looking at those same trees, which, in their own quiet way, had told me a story.
And although the circumstances behind that story were quite different from those we face today, I see some remarkable similarities.
Autumn 2016 was less than a year after Richard’s sudden death. My world had been turned upside down. So much of what I had known, loved & taken for granted had disappeared in an instant.
And as I watched those beautiful trees gradually lose their leaves, I recognised something of myself in them.
Because sometimes life strips us bare.
An unexpected death. A serious illness. The loss of a relationship, a home, financial security or simply the future we had imagined for ourselves. We can find ourselves standing there like those trees in the depths of winter. Hollow. Exposed. A skeleton of who we once were. Stripped of our identity, our confidence, our sense of security & sometimes even our self-worth. And when that happens, it can be terribly difficult to imagine that life will ever be beautiful again.
I wonder whether that is how many people are feeling today.
Not necessarily because they have experienced the devastating loss of someone they love, but because so much of what once gave their lives stability, certainty & meaning seems to be slipping away.
For some, the changes have been gradual. For others, quite sudden.
The rising cost of living. The struggle to make ends meet. The uncertainty about what tomorrow might bring. The feeling that the world they understood is changing faster than they can keep up with. And when people feel powerless to change their circumstances, frustration can turn to anger.
I understand that.
Anger is, after all, a recognised part of grief. And grief isn’t confined to losing someone we love. We can grieve for the loss of security, opportunity, independence & the life we thought we would have.
But there is something else those trees taught me.
Being stripped bare is not the same as being finished.
Because those beautiful Liquid Ambers didn’t remain skeletal forever. They stood through winter, exposed to the cold, the wind & whatever nature threw at them.
And then, imperceptibly, something began to change. Tiny buds appeared. New leaves appeared. And gradually, in nature’s own time, those magnificent trees were once again covered in glorious foliage.
They hadn’t escaped winter. They had endured it.
And they hadn’t restored their beauty by fighting the seasons or violently tearing away what remained of their leaves. They had survived because, beneath their seemingly lifeless branches, they still had everything necessary to begin again.
That realisation was a turning point for me.
Because although we cannot control everything that happens in our lives, we do have some control over how we respond. And unlike my beautiful trees, we have the capacity to make conscious choices. We can remain consumed by anger at what we have lost, or we can begin the often-difficult process of rebuilding what remains.
That doesn’t mean pretending everything is wonderful when it isn’t. It doesn’t mean accepting injustice, excusing poor leadership, or staying silent about decisions that make people’s lives more difficult. And it certainly doesn’t mean that those struggling with circumstances beyond their control can simply wish their troubles away.
Life has been hard for many people for some years now.
We all have our personal difficulties to navigate, without the added burden of economic pressures & political decisions that can make everyday life increasingly challenging.
For some, life has become a struggle simply to remain afloat. And I don’t underestimate that. But I do worry about what happens when anger becomes our permanent state of mind. When we become so consumed by everything that is wrong that we lose sight of everything that might still be right. When we spend so much energy lashing out at people, institutions & circumstances that we have little left to invest in making things better.
Because anger may be an understandable response to adversity, but it is rarely a sufficient plan for overcoming it.
Change requires something more. Determination. Patience. Courage. Effort. And sometimes the willingness to accept that the life ahead of us may look different from the one we left behind.
My trees didn’t return to autumn’s glory overnight. And neither did I.
There were days when simply getting through the day was an achievement. Days when the future seemed impossibly distant. And days when I wondered whether I would ever feel genuinely happy again. But gradually, just like those first tiny buds of spring, life began to return. And that didn’t happen entirely by itself.
At some point, I had to make a conscious decision to stop looking exclusively at everything I had lost & begin recognising everything I still had.
And that wasn’t easy.
Richard was gone. The future we had imagined together was gone. And no amount of positive thinking or gratitude was ever going to bring either back.
But there were still things in my life worth appreciating. People who cared about me. Friendships. Opportunities. The beauty of the natural world. And countless small pleasures that had become almost invisible beneath the weight of grief. I began to understand that if I spent the rest of my life concentrating on what was missing, I risked losing the ability to appreciate what remained.
And that would have been another loss. But one I had some power to prevent. It wasn’t about forgetting the past or pretending the pain had disappeared.
It was about refusing to allow what I had lost to take everything else with it.
Because sometimes the first step towards a better tomorrow isn’t changing our circumstances. It’s changing where we choose to direct our attention.
And I see something of that struggle in the way many people respond to the world around them today. So much of the conversation seems to revolve around what we’ve lost, what has gone wrong, who is responsible & how much worse things might become.
And while some of those concerns are entirely legitimate, I wonder whether our constant focus on everything that is wrong is gradually robbing us of the ability to appreciate everything that is still right. Because when resentment becomes our constant companion, it can begin to shape not only how we see the world, but how we treat the people in it.
We become quicker to criticise, slower to appreciate, more suspicious of others & less willing to believe that anything can change for the better. And most sadly of all, we risk overlooking the very things that might help us find our way forward.
I learnt through grief that concentrating exclusively on what I had lost wasn’t going to bring Richard back. It was simply preventing me from fully appreciating the life I still had. And I wonder whether, as a society, we’re in danger of doing something similar.
We cannot rebuild a better future if we’re so consumed by what we’ve lost that we fail to recognise what we still have to build upon.
Not the same life. Not the life I would have chosen. But a life that could still hold beauty, meaning, gratitude & joy.
And perhaps that is the lesson I want to share today.
We cannot always prevent the winters of our lives. But we should never mistake winter for the end of the story.
Sometimes, beneath what appears to be barren & lifeless, the beginnings of renewal are already taking shape. We simply cannot see them yet.
And instead of allowing our anger about the world to consume us, we need to remember that rebuilding a better one begins with believing it is possible.
After all, spring doesn’t arrive because the trees are angry with winter.
It arrives because winter was never meant to last forever. 🌸
