Behind the Puddle

The trees behind the puddle aren’t trying very hard today. No new leaves. No blossoms. No fruit. No impressive growth. Some of them are nearly bare. If trees had annual performance reviews, October might be difficult to explain. So, what have you accomplished lately? Well… I dropped most of what I spent all summer growing. I stopped producing. I’m conserving energy. I’m standing here.

Not exactly the language we usually associate with success. And yet no one looks at an autumn tree and says: You really should be doing more. We understand that this is what the season asks of it. I wish we were as generous with ourselves.

Doing enough is something I have wrestled with in more ways than one. There is always something else that could be done. One more email. One more load of laundry. One more project. One more person we could help. One more thing we should organize. One more way we could improve ourselves.

Even rest somehow became something we’re supposed to optimize. Did you sleep enough? Walk enough? Drink enough water? Meditate? Stretch? Practice gratitude? Apparently even doing nothing now comes with a checklist. It’s exhausting.

And underneath all that doing is sometimes a quieter question: Am I enough if I’m not doing all of it? That’s harder. Because most of us learned, in one way or another, to connect our value with what we contribute.

We praise children for accomplishments. Adults ask each other what we do for a living. We admire productivity. Independence. Busyness. Being needed can even become part of how we understand ourselves. Then life changes. Bodies change. Energy changes. Responsibilities change.

Maybe illness arrives. Maybe age does. Maybe we simply reach a point where we no longer want to spend every day proving how much we can accomplish. And suddenly we have to figure out who we are when our list of completed tasks gets shorter. I’ve had to learn that.

There are things I used to do that I can’t do now. Things that require help. Things that take longer. Days when what I accomplish would have once felt embarrassingly small. It is very easy on those days to measure myself against an earlier version of me. She could do more. Go farther. Need less help. But she was living in a different season.

Why would I expect today’s life to produce summer leaves in October? Enough has to be allowed to change. Some days enough is completing the entire list. Some days enough is one thing. Some days enough is getting through the appointment. Some days enough is answering the important message and leaving the rest. Some days enough is resting because continuing would cost more than it accomplishes. And sometimes enough has nothing to do with what gets done.

Maybe I am enough before the list begins. That’s the part I think we forget. Rest doesn’t have to be earned by exhaustion. Help doesn’t have to be justified by complete inability. A quiet day doesn’t have to become productive before it counts. We don’t have to improve every experience.

Sometimes sitting behind the puddle is just sitting behind the puddle. Nothing profound happens. No wildlife appears. No life lesson emerges. I sit. Brian sits. The dogs wander around. The water is there. The trees are there. I am there. That’s all. And maybe that’s enough. October has spent almost an entire month showing me things being released. Leaves. Light. Warmth. The fullness of summer.

Perhaps one of the things I can release too is the idea that my worth rises and falls with my productivity. The bare tree doesn’t need to explain itself. It doesn’t need to apologize for this season. It doesn’t need to prove that spring will come.

Today, standing there is enough. Maybe today, being here can be enough for me too.