03/09/2026
A Season to Grow Into
Autumn has always carried the feeling of a new beginning.
The first day back at school brings memories of new shoes, freshly labelled belongings and a uniform deliberately bought a little too large—a uniform with space to grow into. As children, we live in anticipation of what comes next, longing to be older and imagining the freedom that growing up will bring.
Yet, as we grow older, time seems increasingly fleeting. We spend much of our youth wanting to grow up, only to reach later years wishing we could recover something of our youth. The calendar gives time a structure, but our experience of it is far less orderly. Some moments pass unnoticed; others remain with us for a lifetime.
A woman’s life carries its own thresholds: the first menstrual cycle, for some the experience of pregnancy and birth with its potential for new life, and later menopause—not simply an ending, but another transition into an unfamiliar stage. Each asks us to release something of who we have been while making space for who we are becoming.
Nature reveals this continually. Flowers fade and return. Insects emerge briefly, yet live their part fully. An ancient tree may carry both living branches and those that have completed their cycle. Joy and loss, beginnings and endings, exist alongside one another.
Seeing a bird within an enclosure offered another reflection. It is alive and beautiful, yet separated from the freedom of its natural environment. It made me consider the ways we, too, can become confined—by time, expectation, habit or the belief that life will begin properly at some later point.
Perhaps the practice is not to resist change or hold tightly to a particular season, but to be present within the one we are living.
Yoga offers us the pause: the space between one breath and the next, between what has ended and what has not yet begun. A moment in which we do not need to hurry backwards or forwards.
What if each day could be met as though it were the first day?
With anticipation.
With curiosity.
With the willingness to begin again.
And with enough space to grow into the life that is here now.
The cycle is constant, but its expression is always changing.
