Ashley Elzinga

Autumn has me thinking about what falls away and what I still get to keep.

There’s grief in losing familiar work and routines, relief in having room to reconsider them, and uncertainty about what comes next. And when you’ve spent so much of your life being heard, the quiet can feel personal.

Some days I can see the possibility in all this space. Other days, I just miss knowing where I belong. I can be excited about a new direction and still wish the old one hadn’t ended the way it did.

But autumn is also harvest. I’m carrying everything those years gave me: the skills, the friendships, the stories, the nerve to walk into a room and make something happen.

If you’re in a season like this, try asking yourself three things:

What am I grieving?
What am I relieved to put down?
What do I want to carry forward?

They might have overlapping answers. You can miss something that exhausted you. You can want a different life and still be upset about how this one changed.

And you don’t have to turn it into a beautiful lesson immediately. Some things hurt without handing you a life-changing revelation.

I’m still figuring out what comes next. But I’m trying to stop treating the life I’m living in between as something to hurry through.

Even with the branches bare, the roots still know what to do.