Good evening. Here I am again. I hope you’re all doing well.
Autumn is slowly approaching. This season always comes to remind me that it is time to let go.
In another post, I already talked about the cycle of the seasons and of nature. About how simple letting go seems when we look at it from the outside, and how difficult it can be when we are the ones who have to open our hands. Leaves fall without questioning whether they should stay a little longer on the branch. They don’t try to hold on to their golden colour until winter arrives. Their time comes, and they fall.
We, on the other hand, hold on with a strength that sometimes I find difficult to understand.
We hold on to people, to chapters of our lives, to places, to versions of ourselves. We hold on to goals and material things as if, once we finally have them, we will find something we have been searching for all along. And yet, if there is one thing we all know, even if we don’t think about it very often, it is that one day we will have to leave without taking any of it with us.
Not even the things we fought so hard for.
Truthfully, I am not this reflective in my everyday life. I wish I were. I have to remind myself constantly because, if I don’t, I forget. Sometimes I even forget to ask myself why I want something so badly in the first place.
I become completely absorbed in achieving a goal. I become so focused on getting there that everything else begins to disappear. And when I finally achieve it, after all that effort, sometimes I barely have time to feel it. There is already something else in front of me. Another goal. Another desire. Another mountain to climb.
And the chase begins again.
It may sound chaotic when I put it this way, but I think some people will understand exactly what I mean. That feeling of pursuing something so intensely that, when you finally have it, you no longer quite know what to do with it. As if the real fuel had always been the pursuit itself.
Sometimes I end up deeply exhausted by everything I have fought for. A literal burnout. And then I ask myself whether it was really worth so much effort. Whether I actually wanted what I was chasing, or whether I had simply become accustomed to needing something to chase.
Perhaps that is why autumn returns every year.
To remind us that not everything has to be kept.
That things can end without having been a failure. That something can have been beautiful and, at the same time, have reached the moment when it needs to be released. That we can let go of a leaf without ceasing to love the tree.
Carl Jung wrote extensively about the parts of ourselves that remain unknown to us, and about the need to look inward in order to understand why we keep walking certain paths. There is an idea of his that always makes me think: until we make the unconscious conscious, it directs our lives and we call it fate.
How many times do we believe we are choosing, when in reality we are following something within ourselves that we have never even stopped to look at?
Perhaps we pursue because we are afraid of standing still.
Perhaps we accumulate because some part of us still feels that something is missing.
Perhaps we fight so hard because, deep down, we believe that once we arrive somewhere, we will finally be able to rest.
And perhaps that is why, when we get there, we discover that we are still ourselves.
With our questions.
With our wounds.
With that strange feeling that nothing we can possess can remain inside us forever.
But leaving all of that aside, because I have already talked about autumn and its lesson of letting go, like those golden leaves that eventually fall to the ground, something new has happened to me.
Something rather earthly, let’s put it that way.
I fell in love.
Or something like it.
With someone I barely know. I saw him a couple of times about a year ago. We stopped talking, and a few weeks ago we got back in touch.
And the truth is, I know practically nothing about him.
I only know what he chooses to show on social media, which is very little. I don’t know whether he is interested in me. I don’t know whether he has a partner. I don’t know what he thinks when we talk, or what place I actually have in his life.
I know nothing.
And you might be wondering why I am telling you all this.
Because I am just another human being.
Because the same things happen to me that happen to everyone else.
Sometimes we write from our ideas, from the things we have read, from what we believe we have understood about life. But we are also here, in the middle of all of it, feeling things we cannot explain. With desires, contradictions, doubts and emotions that appear without asking permission.
This is the first time something like this has happened to me.
I say that I am in love, but I could use any other adjective, because I don’t really know what to call what I feel. I know I like him. I know I feel an immense tenderness when I think about him. I know that for most of my life, if I had felt something like this, I would have immediately run towards it.
I would have wanted to know.
I would have wanted to discover.
I would have wanted to squeeze every last drop out of the experience.
Consume it.
Never even give it the chance to simply exist.
I have always felt the need to take things somewhere. As if an emotion necessarily had to become a story. As if feeling something were the beginning of a race to find out what I could get from it.
But this time I want it to be different.
I have no intention of exploring this relationship any further.
And even as I write that, it surprises me.
Because yes, I like him. But I want to keep it platonic. I don’t really know why. Perhaps because, for the first time, I don’t feel the need to possess what I feel.
And that idea has made me think a lot.
I think this is the first time in my life that I am more in love with the feeling of being able to fall in love than with the person himself.
This week I have been trying to understand why.
Looking for explanations, reading, observing myself. Because I genuinely had no answer. How could I feel so much for someone I barely know? And how could I, at the same time, not want to turn it into something more?
And perhaps part of the answer lies precisely there.
In the fact that I don’t know enough.
In the space that remains.
And in that space, everything I carry within myself also appears.
Jung spoke about projection, about that very human tendency to place parts of ourselves onto another person. Sometimes we don’t see only the person standing in front of us. We also see our desires, our possibilities, the things we long to discover, the part of ourselves that has not yet found a way to emerge.
Perhaps some people come into our lives and awaken something that was already asleep inside us.
They don’t necessarily come to give us something.
Sometimes they come to remind us of something.
And I don’t know if that is what is happening to me. I don’t pretend to have a definitive explanation. In fact, I think I am learning not to need one so quickly.
I only know that this feeling is teaching me something I never expected.
That I can feel without running.
That I can want without immediately trying to make something mine.
That I can be amazed by what someone awakens in me without asking them to do anything with it.
And this is new for me.
Rumi wrote that love is the bridge between you and everything. Perhaps for a long time I thought that loving someone meant reaching them. Closing the distance. Being loved in return. Building something that could be touched and given a name.
But lately I have been wondering whether, sometimes, love can also be a bridge inward.
Someone appears and, without barely knowing them, something opens.
Suddenly, you want things again.
You want to continue with your projects.
You want to take care of yourself.
You want to get up and keep creating.
You want to feel.
And then you realise that perhaps you were never really looking for that person.
Perhaps you were looking for that feeling of being alive again.
I don’t know what will happen with any of this. And for the first time, I don’t think I want to know before the time comes.
There is something beautiful about not forcing an emotion to become something more.
About letting it breathe.
About not pulling it apart to analyse it.
About not running after it.
About not trying to catch it.
Simply feeling it while it is here.
Perhaps this also has something to do with autumn and everything I have been thinking about lately. With learning to let go even before we possess something. With understanding that not everything beautiful has to end up in our hands in order to have existed.
Some things come into our lives to stay.
Some things come to leave.
And there are others that perhaps never fully arrive, yet still change something inside us.
Rumi said that the wound is the place where the light enters you. I would add that sometimes there are also people who enter our lives through a tiny door and, without making much noise, illuminate a room we didn’t even know was dark.
I don’t know who this guy really is.
I don’t know what he feels.
I don’t know what he is looking for.
I don’t know whether we will talk a lot, a little, or not at all again.
And this time I don’t want to fill all those silences with invented answers.
I want to leave room for not knowing.
Because perhaps one of the hardest things to let go of is not a person or a goal. Perhaps it is our need to control where things are going.
This feeling is teaching me that I can love something without chasing it.
That I can be curious without turning curiosity into anxiety.
That I can find someone beautiful and not need that beauty to become a story.
And that, as strange as it may sound, I can also feel grateful simply because I am capable of feeling something like this.
Because after all the things we chase, all the goals, all the struggles and all the times we believe we need to achieve something in order to feel complete, sometimes an emotion appears and reminds us that we are still here.
That we can still feel tenderness.
That we can still become excited about life.
That we can still look at someone and think that it is wonderful that, among millions of people, someone managed to awaken something inside us.
And perhaps, for now, that is enough.
I wanted to share this with you because I don’t want to write only when I have answers. I also want to write from the places where I am still learning.
From the things I don’t understand.
From my contradictions.
From the things I am afraid to admit.
And from this strange and gentle experience of being, for the first time, a little in love with the possibility of falling in love.
Maybe tomorrow all of this will change.
Maybe in a few months I will read these words and smile.
But today, this is how it feels.
And for once, I don’t want to rush to turn it into something else.