The Humility of Life Beyond My Control

The cold has crept upon us like a Halloween ghost.  It isn’t so much that we didn’t know it was coming; we simply didn’t see it coming.  I didn’t notice its approach, so busy was I admiring the color in the trees and the settling pace.

And then the night froze and the puddles hardened and the leaves fell as, in quick succession, did the first snow.  Our language deceives us - or at least lulls us into unsuspectedness.  Winter - not the actual experience of it, but the calendared technicality of the birth of it - doesn’t actually arrive for weeks.  Several of them.  We can be forgiven, I suppose, for expecting the Cosmos to abide by the seasonal frames.  Autumn, we would like it somehow enforced, will be given its free and full expression - mild days and crisp nights colored by painted leaves - between the autumnal equinox in mid-September and the winter solstice in late December.  No encroachment by a lagging summer on the front end nor an impatient winter on the backside.  Later on, we might make happy exception should an early spring shave a few days or even weeks off of winter.  But if there is a God above, let autumn enjoy it’s full complement of days.

The cold truth, however, is that it doesn’t work that way.  Seasons flow like a stream, drying to a trickle on random occasion while swelling unnaturally and dangerously beyond its banks on another.  Mercurial, they move like the Spirit:  where and when they will.

Like most everything else that finally matters.  Only the puny and ephemeral is subject to our control.   Life and love; meaning and even mastery; joy and depression; condemnation and salvation - all beyond our control or determination.  We can practice and rehearse; we can study and work hard; we can needle and advocate, twist arms and raise our voice, but by only the most superficial definition do we own credit for success or failure.

There is a deep humility required for this admission.  We boast of agency.  We measure, we reward, we incentivize, we nudge, we shame, all in service to our hunger for merit - and aversion to demerit.  But while we can improve on or fall short of arbitrary markers; while we can win jobs or wars or games or awards; while we can best our competition; while we can move certain needles more or less in our favor, we are constantly surprised by how much that matters to us is beyond our control.

Acknowledging this isn’t fatalism; it isn’t stoic detachment.  It is simply the truth that nature speaks all around me.  I had no say in the reddening of the leaves, nor the timing of their fall.  As Job was forced to admit, I do not know the way to the place where light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered, nor have I entered the storehouses of the snow.  I only know it fell this week.

And I didn’t see it coming.