Trees Do It

There’s a tree outside my bedroom window that has lost nearly all of its leaves. There are a few stragglers left, clinging to the tips of the otherwise bare branches, fluttering defiantly in the wind. I found myself this morning looking out and thinking, What are they waiting for?

Autumn is traditionally a time for letting go and most of the leaves’ brethren have already bid farewell, impressively so over the last month, going out in a blaze of Technicolor glory. But these few stubborn holdovers got me to thinking. What am I still holding onto that I should be letting go of instead?

As a recovering alcoholic, it’s easy to think back and remember a time that was characterized not by the concept of letting go but rather by the notion of holding on, at all costs, to the few things I felt were actually keeping me alive—like the alcohol, for example. I really did think that drinking is what was keeping me going, not what was pulling me down. 

Getting sober was my first real experience of letting go, of simply releasing that which I could no longer support. Essentially, I had reached the tipping point where it was either alcohol or me; one of us had to go.

That began for me a kind of personal autumn, a prolonged period of stripping away a lot of images and mythology that I had about myself—who I really was and who I thought I was. Once I had gotten down to the bare bones, the foliage began to grow back and, while it hasn’t always been without struggle, I have enjoyed many years of continued growth and wellbeing.

But, the leaves outside my window reminded me this morning that it isn’t always easy to let go and that, even when all signs point toward its necessity, there can still be considerable resistance to letting go.

For instance, the resentment I have been nurturing over the last couple of months with a family member. The resentment has its roots way back in my childhood, but recent events have brought it to the surface again. It’s a resentment I thought I had put to bed many years ago, but its new configuration at this point in time has forced me to look at it again, in a slightly different light.

Like one of the leaves still clinging to the branches against all odds, I have found this resentment has given me a certain energy over the past few months, as if it were catching and transforming every last possible bit of light from the sun. 

My wife has asked me a number of times this fall, “Are you ready to let this go?” and my answer has been consistently “No.” It’s inevitable to me that I will, in fact, let go of this resentment. It just doesn’t make sense to hold onto it. My father is 87 years old, after all, and it’s just not reasonable to think that his behavior is all of a sudden going to change. Yet it has also been important for me to recognize my own anger relative to my relationship with my father—much of which has been positive since I got sober—and to realize how hurt I have been, both long ago as a child and more recently as an adult, by what I perceive as his inability to see who I really am.

It’s getting colder though, and I need to conserve energy. It’s natural to let things go—trees do it—and I am looking forward to the day when the last leaves of resentment finally separate from the limb, skittering off in the wind, taking their final moments on nature’s incomparable stage before settling down in earnest for the long winter.

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