Fall is my favorite time of year. I love the fall colors and the harvest foods: pumpkin, butternut squash, brussels sprouts, turkey, and sweet potatoes. Even though it’s one of my favorite months, it’s also a hard month. Unlike spring where each rainy day brings promises of fresh growth and summer days of sun, fall is different. Fall is about leaves dropping, storing food for the winter, shorter days, and colder nights. It’s a season of letting go, cleaning up, and preparing for colder, darker times.
Leaning into fall takes grit. Just like the trees, you must commit to letting go and prepare to hunker down and face the cold. Part of that preparation includes storing up. Squirrels store up nuts. Some animals begin storing up fat and finding places to burrow in for the winter. I like to use this time to store up blessings.
The holidays in fall focus on gratitude and thanksgiving for a reason. Expressing gratitude is one of the best ways to shift your mindset toward abundance and positive results. It’s a necessary ingredient for being able to lean in. These things we are grateful for, give us strength, hope and courage when things are difficult. They help us to lean-in.
Take some time to prepare for winter. Start your gratitude collection. Write a list of all the things you are grateful for and keep it somewhere where you can refer to it as you work through your projects and goals. Don’t try to do it all at once. Do it like the trees. Drop a few here and there. Maybe if you get a burst of inspiration, drop a whole list of blessings. Pretty soon you’ll have a whole pile. Then comes the fun! Jump in. Dig right into that pile of blessings and pull out the ones that really mean something to you. Find the ones you really want to lean into over the winter. Maybe you’ve realized you have a friendship that has blessed you, but you haven’t nurtured it lately. Perhaps you haven’t spent as much time with family as you would like. Is there a hobby or activity you haven’t done in a while, but you really feel blessed by it?
Lean into your blessings and choose one or two to focus on during the winter season. Maybe set aside time to write letters, meet with people, or do an activity you enjoy. Many of us do these things anyway over the winter holidays. Sometimes though we just do them as if we are on autopilot. We sometimes think of them as obligations rather than blessings. As we end this fall season, I encourage you to lean into your blessings. Pile them around you. Greet them with openness and awe. Fall is a great time to do more than just lean in–JUMP IN and scatter blessings everywhere you go!
