Why Does Autumn Feel Old?

Digging into the depths of our universal infatuation with Autumn

By Claudia Garcia

When the leaves start to change their colors, we all can’t help but feel a bit of mixed emotions well up within us. The morning rains bring up that sweet, earthly aroma. The sidewalk is decorated with the red and orange leaves that crunch so attractively when stepped on. The smell of those Halloween-themed Pillsbury cookies flourishes through the walls of your home.

Each step you take outside in autumn feels like a melancholic piano chord, singing a slow and familiar song the farther along you walk on the sidewalk keys. Looking upward through the bare branches that slice up the gray sky, your nose begins to run from the firm breeze that passes through the air. Your eyes start to water a bit, but you can’t figure out if it’s from a new, frigid change in the weather, or an old but muted hurt in yourself.

You seem to find an aching in your chest that bleeds into the rest of your body; that sad piano song seems to quicken its rhythm, a stronger beat pulsing within the depths of your chest. There’s a longing for something lost, but was it ever really found? Could it be that we’re still searching for it? Hoping to find it within the start of this returning fall season?

Upon all of the emotional stir is the oh-so-sweet feeling of nostalgia, pumping sensations of merriment as well as desolation into our psyche. You know the feeling, the phenomenon that's constantly sweeping across the minds of all the adults of our world?

We hate to love it.

Kind of like pressing your finger into a fresh bruise, it’s a feeling that hurts, but in a good way. There’s an understanding that we can never return to moments from our past again, so we crave it. Reliving it inside our minds grants us comfort, but only for a moment.

Why does the season do this to us? A universal infatuation with Autumn; we carry it all through the year, unaware of it. It isn’t until Summer shuts her eyes that we feel a sense that something is off. Something appears to be missing. We tend to solve this internal issue with a change: could it be the fresh start of the new school year? Or perhaps moving into a new apartment? Maybe meeting someone new? But even when there’s something new, there’s still that underlying longing.

We feel it in our bones.

Could it be that Autumn feels like such a season of the past because it lives inside moments in time when we were children and truly “blissfully ignorant?” It felt like not so long ago we could dive into a pile of leaves and lack the capacity to care if we ruined our clothes or messed up our hair. Our decisions at that time had little to no effect on the outcome of our future. We were sailing through life with the help of our parents or guardians. We were young. We were carefree.

And now, when we are hit with the start of the fall season, we are reminded of how easy it used to be. And with that comes the sense of becoming older.

That’s the scariest part.

Just like the leaves, we wither into our new colors. We begin to prioritize other things and fill our minds, until all at once, it seems that our good times have dried up. And when we begin to realize this, it’s too late. The very nature of our past has fallen off and caught the wind; we are only left with the blissful memories, the bare branches of it all.

We’ve realized we are way past those days. We are on our own now, discovering what it is we want in life. Some find enjoyment now in clubbing instead of in hide and seek or going for a coffee instead of playdates. We’ve become independent, “mature.” We’ve moved on and we are content — or so we say.

Yet, we still seem to ache for those days back. More realistically, we ache for a feeling back.

Genuine happiness.

Some believe that those times are the last moments we will ever be happy to that extent. And truthfully, they’re correct.

I do not believe we could ever feel as truly happy as when we were children. Even then, if we were not happy, we were children. Then, we were not as socially nor self-aware as we are now. We were not concerned about the world around us, in front of us, or inside of us. We were naïve. Life didn’t make sense to us back then, but we were complacent. Still, life doesn’t make sense, but now it seems a little harder to deal with.

Yet, we must accept it.

Life will never cease to confuse us all. But that doesn’t mean it has to hold us back. Each decision we choose leads us to new experiences and people, and although these new experiences may be daunting, they could also be beautiful.

So let it transpire.

As I approach my 20th birthday, I can’t help but feel a bit of fear. There are so many moments I feel completely lost in translation, like I’m floating through everything and nothing seems to pull me down to the Earth. There seems to be something missing in my life, and, like many others, I begin to long for whatever that missing something is once the leaves start to fall. I search for it in the wrong places; I search for it through the restless nights tossing and turning, the endless array of songs separating me from reality, through the exchanging of glances with familiar yet strange eyes, and so forth. But that’s something I continue to work on.

But when I look at the world in front of me, the world I’ve been given, and the life I've had the pleasure of building for myself, I feel a sense of happiness.

A new sense of happiness.

Similar to the moments of my childhood, I hope it proves to be just as big, kind, and wonderfully naïve (in all the ways that count). But I also desire for the feeling to surprise me in new forms the farther along I walk the sidewalk keys of my life, for that melancholic piano will indeed brighten up its melody. And if I find that it doesn’t, let’s hope something better falls from the trees next year,

next Autumn.