Behind the Puddle

We really like beginnings. We celebrate new babies, relationships, homes, jobs, plans, the first flowers of spring, tiny baby geese, and baby mallards following behind their mother. New things arrive with possibility. We take pictures, celebrate, and tell everyone. Beginnings are easy to recognize as beautiful.

Autumn makes a pretty convincing argument that beauty isn’t limited to beginnings. The trees behind the puddle are doing something remarkable. They are moving toward the end of a growing season. The leaves that appeared fresh and green months ago are changing, and soon they will fall.

Nothing about that sounds particularly beautiful when described technically. Yet, people drive for miles to look at it. We take pictures, stop beside roads, plan trips around peak color, and stand underneath trees that are literally releasing what they spent an entire season growing. We look up and say, “Look how beautiful.” I think there’s something worth noticing there.

Humans aren’t always as generous when we look at ourselves. We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with aging. Youth is celebrated, newness is marketed, and we are encouraged to hide the evidence that time has passed. Gray hair, wrinkles, changing bodies, and slower movement all become signs we are taught to resist.

But those are also signs that we have lived long enough for life to leave evidence. We don’t always call them beautiful. Why not? A face at seventy holds something a face at twenty cannot. It is not better or worse, but different, carrying years, laughter, loss, worry, love, experience, and survival.

A body that has carried someone through decades deserves more than being compared with the body it used to be. People do too. There are kinds of beauty we simply cannot possess at the beginning.

There is beauty in a relationship that has survived difficult years and in old friends who know the stories without needing an explanation. There is beauty in hands that have cared for children, parents, partners, gardens, animals, homes, and countless ordinary things. There is beauty in someone finally becoming comfortable enough with themselves to stop performing for everyone else. There is also beauty in knowing what matters and, perhaps, knowing that time is limited.

I don’t mean that every part of aging is lovely. It isn’t. Bodies hurt, abilities change, people we love die, and losses occur that we would never romanticize.

Autumn isn’t beautiful because winter is coming. It is beautiful because this stage of the tree’s life has beauty of its own. Maybe ours does too. We don’t have to pretend the difficult parts aren’t difficult in order to recognize what is still beautiful.

Behind the puddle, the trees are not trying to look like they did in June. They couldn’t. If they did, we would miss this. We would miss the gold, orange, red, and light coming through leaves that won’t remain much longer.

Maybe that’s part of what makes us stop and look. We know it won’t last. Instead of making the beauty smaller, impermanence somehow makes us pay closer attention. Perhaps that is true of people, relationships, ordinary days, and our own lives too.

Beauty doesn’t belong only to what is beginning. It also belongs to becoming, maturity, things that have weathered seasons, and what has been changed by time. Sometimes, there is breathtaking beauty in a season simply because it has finally become exactly what it is.