The Season Changed While I Wasn't Looking

The Season Changed While I Wasn't Looking

There is rarely a moment.

That may be why we miss so much.

We imagine change as something that happens.

A door closes.

A decision is made.

Someone leaves.

Something begins.

But most of life doesn't move that way.

It changes while remaining familiar.

Your face changes slowly enough for the mirror to keep calling it yours.

The people you love become different people without becoming different people.

The place you couldn't imagine leaving becomes somewhere you used to live.

Something that hurt every day begins hurting every few days.

Then occasionally.

One afternoon someone mentions what happened and you realize you haven't thought about it in months.

You didn't heal on Tuesday.

Tuesday was just Tuesday.

There was no morning when you stopped being who you were.

No afternoon when you became who you are.

You were making coffee.

Answering messages.

Changing your mind.

Getting things wrong.

Sleeping.

Waking.

Living.

Somewhere among all of that, things moved.

A little less of this.

A little more of that.

Until you looked around and recognized everything, but nothing was quite where you left it.

Including you.

We like beginnings because we can point to them.

Endings too.

The middle is harder.

The middle doesn't tell us what it is doing.

It lets us make breakfast.

Go to work.

Forgive someone a little.

Become tired of something we once wanted.

Begin enjoying something we once resisted.

All of it happens without ceremony.

Then one day we give it a name.

A new season.

As though it began when we noticed.

It didn't.

We were already inside it.

You Were There

We speak about our lives as though we arrived afterward.

Back when I was younger.

Before everything changed.

When we were still together.

Before I knew better.

There is always a version of us standing here, looking back at someone who seems to belong to another time.

But you were there.

You were the one who didn't know yet.

The one who believed what you believed.

The one who stayed.

The one who left.

The one who couldn't imagine leaving.

The distance between who you were and who you are can make the past feel as though it happened to somebody else.

But there was no morning when you stopped being that person.

You carried them forward.

Some things fell away.

Some stayed.

Some changed their names.

Fear became caution.

Ambition became exhaustion.

Loneliness became solitude.

Something you once called failure became the reason your life went another way.

Even our words change as we do.

The past doesn't.

But what it means can.

A conversation ended ten years ago and today you hear it differently.

A choice cannot be undone, but you no longer wish to undo it.

Someone who hurt you becomes someone you understand.

Someone you admired becomes someone you can finally see.

A memory you spent years avoiding becomes one you can sit with without needing it to leave.

Nothing back there moved.

You did.

The view changed with you.

We sometimes call this wisdom.

It may simply be what happens when you live long enough to lose some certainty.

You discover that something can be right and still hurt.

That love doesn't guarantee staying.

That leaving doesn't always mean love disappeared.

That getting what you wanted can reveal that you wanted the wrong thing.

That not getting it can quietly build a life you couldn't have planned.

None of this arrives together.

Life gives us today.

Then another today.

Then another.

Somewhere among them, what we were certain about loosens.

We don't hear it loosen.

One day we reach for the old certainty and discover we don't need it anymore.

What You Knew

There was a time when you knew.

You knew what you would never tolerate.

What kind of person you would never become.

What you would do if it ever happened to you.

You knew who was wrong.

Who was right.

What mattered.

What didn't.

It was easier then.

Not because life was easier.

Because so much of it had not happened yet.

There are things you can know only before you live them.

You can know exactly what you would do with a broken heart until yours breaks.

You can know how someone should raise a child before a child is awake at three in the morning and nothing you do makes the crying stop.

You can know that money doesn't matter until there isn't enough.

You can know that people should leave when they are unhappy until leaving means dividing a home, a history, a family, a life.

You can know that forgiveness is necessary until someone does the thing you are supposed to forgive.

From a distance, almost everything has a clean answer.

Then life brings it close.

The edges disappear.

This doesn't mean there is no right or wrong.

Some things become clearer the closer you get.

Other things refuse to remain as simple as they were when they belonged to someone else.

We become slower to tell people what they should have done.

We ask another question before giving an answer.

We discover that two things can be true without one of them needing to win.

Not because we have become uncertain about everything.

Certainty has simply become more expensive.

We know what it costs now.

There are convictions worth keeping.

Lines worth drawing.

Things that deserve a clear no.

There are also beliefs we carried because they had never been asked to carry any weight.

Life eventually puts weight on them.

Some hold.

Some bend.

Some break completely.

There is something humbling about watching a belief you defended for years collapse under the ordinary pressure of being alive.

You may try to rebuild it.

Use the same arguments.

Repeat the same words.

Return to the people who still believe it.

For a while, it can almost feel intact.

But once you've seen through something, pretending not to see takes effort.

Eventually you get tired.

You leave the pieces where they fell.

And keep living.

Years later, you may meet someone who still believes what you once believed.

They speak with a certainty you recognize.

Maybe even the anger.

For a moment you want to tell them everything you learned.

Then you remember.

Nobody could have talked you out of what life had not yet shown you.

So you listen.

You might say something.

You might not.

Somewhere along the way, knowing became less important than seeing.

You don't remember when.