Today we “fall back,” setting our clocks back an hour for the end of daylight savings time. It isn’t exactly a free hour—it’s an hour that you saved up back in March that you must now withdraw from that time bank. Wouldn’t it be great if we could collect interest on the time we save, gathering minutes as the months go by? But the only way to add to an hour is to get the most you can from each minute that you have.
How will you spend the hour that you have been saving all these months?
On Halloween we scare ourselves with skeletons, and as the trees lose their leaves we may think the bare branches ominous or dull. But there is also beauty in the bones of things, in the spare shape of the structures at the center.
In times of loss, have you found beauty in the essentials that remained?
Have you ever picked up a fallen chestnut or walnut, and peeled back the husk to find the nut beneath? Without experience you would never know that a glossy chestnut would hide under that prickly green skin, or that a walnut was lurking under the unattractive green and black husk.
What experience that seemed off-putting has yielded a pleasant surprise?
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light writes Mary Oliver. In the same way that the colors of a sunset get more intense before they fade to dark, autumn offers us nature’s brightest beauty before the dullness of winter takes over.
How has aging brought out the color and beauty in you or someone you love?
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” Remember when falling down was fun? Of course, literal falling gets more dangerous as our bodies age, but as we get older we also seem to get more cautious about metaphorical kinds of falling. We don’t want to be seen as messing up; we worry that we will be perceived as failures. But some of the world’s great discoveries have come from the creative handling of mistakes—graceful ways of getting up after falling down.
How can you turn a mistake or failure into something that is simply part of the game?
