The Spiral of Letting Go-Life as Teacher, Part One

The trees do not ask whether it is time to let go of their leaves, they simply know. I wonder how we, too, might learn that kind of trust.

September brings the slow release of autumn, reminding me that life moves in cycles of holding on and letting go. The leaves fall without resistance, returning to the earth, making way for what is next. Their surrender is not loss but wisdom.

Some releases are gentle, like the quiet drift of a leaf. Others arrive as heartbreak, when love and loss wrestle in the same breath. Either way, fall whispers the same lesson: nothing lasts forever, and in that truth lies a deeper kind of beauty.

Walking the Spiral

Letting go isn’t always easy. We cling perhaps wondering who we will be without that person, that job, that lifestyle, that identity. Yet the truth is, our essential nature lies beneath all of it, waiting to be revealed in the letting go.

This doesn’t mean we cannot love or embody these roles and identities. It only means they are as fleeting as the seasons. They shape us for a time, but they are not the whole of who we are. They do not define us. What endures is deeper, the essential nature that remains when all else has fallen away.

Life doesn’t move in straight lines. It moves in spirals. Each season circles back, not repeating exactly, but bringing us deeper into wisdom. Each time I return to the lesson of letting go, I discover it in a new way.

Lessons from My Journey

October marked a moment of profound change in my life. It was the month my son’s diagnosis arrived, and with it, the beginning of a path of awakening that would ask me to surrender and deepen into the raw truth of this human experience. It was not the kind of awakening I would have ever chosen, yet it opened me to lessons that continue to shape who I am today.

Letting go did not come easily. I clung to what I loved most fiercely, unwilling to release what felt too precious to lose. In that struggle, I began to see that love and loss are inseparable companions — and that life’s beauty is intensified by its impermanence. What I resisted most was also what revealed the deepest wisdom: that nothing lasts forever, and in that truth, the preciousness is illuminated.

That is the paradox of love and loss: the very fragility of life is what makes it sacred.

How Loss Touches Us All

Loss is not reserved for death alone. It touches us in many forms — the ending of a relationship, the loss of a job, the shifting of identity, the quiet grief of aging or transition. Often these thresholds arrive without warning, in ways we cannot prepare for. And yet, each one carries the same invitation: to soften our grip, to let what is essential rise to the surface, and to be reshaped by what remains.

The Preciousness of Now

This is the wisdom that fall invites me back to again and again: impermanence is not the enemy. It is the truth of life. Nothing belongs to us — not the people we love, not even our own days. Everything we are given is a gift.

The body, too, belongs to these cycles, every inhale gathering, every exhale releasing, like the trees surrendering their leaves.

When I resist that truth, I suffer. When I soften into it, I notice the luminous beauty of each ordinary moment — the sound of laughter, the warmth of sunlight, the quiet breath moving in and out. To know something will not last is to cherish it more fully while it’s here, and never take one single moment for granted.

Perhaps wisdom is in the surrender itself, in trusting, like the trees, when it is time to let go. And perhaps the deeper teaching is this: life will bring us back to this lesson again and again, circling us through the spiral of letting go — each time inviting us into a greater freedom, and a deeper love.

My Invitation to you

So as September deepens and the leaves begin their slow descent, I offer this reflection:

• What in your life is quietly asking to be released?

• What roles or identities have shaped you for a season, but no longer define the whole of who you are?

• And what, in its very impermanence, feels most precious to hold close right now?