equal night on the full equinox - the endings we skip past and a reflection practice for the turning

Art © Sergey Nivens via Canva.com

Think for a minute about how much we have built around beginnings.

We gave one of them an entire holiday. Resolutions. Word of the year. Vision boards, clean slates, fresh starts, the first of the month, Monday morning. Graduations, housewarmings, ribbon cuttings, and baby showers. When something opens, we know exactly what to do. We show up with food.

Now think about what we've built around endings.

There's a funeral or a celebration of life. That's more or less the whole list.

We generally dismiss most endings. The job you left on purpose. The friendship that thinned out without a single argument. The version of yourself you outgrew. The house

you sold to people who will paint over the pencil marks on the door frame. The role you carried for twenty years that quietly stopped being true.

No ceremony. No casserole. Usually we start the next thing and hope the last one goes away on its own.

It usually doesn't.

Grief and desire, in the same moment

Here is what I see most often in my work.

Someone makes a change they wanted. They chose it. They worked toward it, sometimes for years. And then the sadness arrives, right on schedule, and they read it as evidence that they got it wrong.

They didn't get it wrong. What they're feeling is the ending they didn’t anticipate.

Grief and desire can live in the same moment. Excitement and loss show up together more often than they do apart. This is one of the most consistent things I encounter in myself and in nearly every person I work with. It isn't a malfunction. It's what it feels like to be someone who is gaining and losing at the same time, which is what every real change actually is.

Unfortunately, when you don’t acknowledge an ending, it doesn’t go away. Usually it goes underground and comes back sideways. A mood you can't trace to anything. Resistance to something harmless. An irritation that doesn't match the size of its cause. Grief you skip doesn't disappear; it shows up when you least expect it.

I've watched what happens when someone finally acknowledges the ending out loud. That part of my life is over. Not tragically, factually. Their whole body changes; shoulders drop, the jaw releases. Our bodies know before we do.

That's what naming an ending does. It isn't wallowing. It's setting something down that you've been holding without noticing the weight.

What the equinox actually does

This is why fall is the right season for reflection.

On the evening of September 22 this year, the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south. That's the equinox. The word is Latin, aequus and nox, equal night. Light and dark come very nearly even, everywhere on Earth, at the same moment.

Here's the part I find genuinely moving. Dark and light. Night and day. Endings and beginnings are equal.

Fall doesn't hide the losing part. The leaves don't come down discreetly at night when no one's watching. The garden doesn't tidy itself out of politeness. Everything is visibly, unapologetically letting go, while at the same time pulling what matters back down into the root, out of sight, for later.

Nothing about autumn pretends that beginning and ending are separate events. It does both at once, out in the open, without a story about what it's supposed to mean.

A reflection for the turning

Here is a simple practice giving space to our endings.

First, name what's ending.

Not what's broken. Not what needs fixing. What's over, even if it ended well, even if you chose it, even if you're mostly relieved.

• What ended this year that I moved past too quickly?

• What am I still carrying that's already finished?

• What did I choose that I'm still a little sad about?

• What did I lose that nobody else noticed?

Write them down. Then leave them there. Don't reframe them into lessons, don't hunt for the silver lining, don't explain to yourself why it was for the best. The ending gets its own page. This is harder than it sounds, because we are so trained to rush to the meaning.

If it feels right, mark one of them in some small way. Say it out loud in your kitchen. Tell one person. Take it on a walk without trying to solve it. Cut something back in the garden.

Then, and only then, look at what has space to grow.

• What did I learn that I didn't want to learn?

• Where did I feel most like myself? Not most productive, most myself.

• What has this ending actually made room for?

• What do I want to be true a few months from now, not a resolution, just something I'd recognize if I saw it?

That order matters more than the questions do. Reaching for what's next before you've acknowledged what's over is how people end up rebuilding the same thing they just left.

Do it badly, and do it often

You don't need thirty quiet minutes and a beautiful notebook to do this (but I completely understand if you want the notebook!). The back of an envelope works. Ten minutes in the car before you go into the house works. Saying it out loud works.

If you write one entry and then nothing for three weeks, nothing is broken. You pick it up again. That's the whole method.

And none of this belongs to September. Some people do a version of it on the first of every month. Others at the end of a quarter. Some do it on their birthday, or whenever a book changes their mind about something. The turn of a season is a useful prompt because it's visible, and because it arrives whether or not you're ready. But it isn't the only time, and you're allowed to do it as often as you need.

You can begin again in March. You can begin again the week after you already began.

Equal night

The equinox will pass in a single evening, whether or not anyone marks it. Light and dark, even for a moment, and then the long lean toward winter.

You could let it pass. We usually do.

Or you could take that evening, or any evening near it, and give something the ending it never got. A simple sentence out loud: that's over, and it mattered.

Nature teaches us that each season is needed. To grow, we have to let go. We have to go dormant. Letting go is not the opposite of growth; it’s the first step.

Whatever you name this month - the thing that's over, the thing you set down, the thing nobody threw you a party for - you aren't only closing something. You're clearing ground. You're getting ready to grow.

Then you give it the winter. That part isn't waiting. It’s the work beginning.