The brightly colored leaves, the crisp cool mornings, the signs and celebrations of harvest, all turn me on. But beyond my personal tastes, autumn describes midlife well for several reasons. Like autumn, midlife is our season of harvest. In addition, autumn is a season without the pests of spring and summer, things such as flies, mosquitoes, and weeds. Similarly, midlife is free from some of the pesky baggage of youth.
Midlife maturity tends to eliminate the trite and petty from our experience.
Midlifers know that life is too short to let personal vanity or the fickleness of public opinion keep us from daily joys. And most of us can't think of autumn without thinking of our harvest celebrations, which in the U.S. center around Thanksgiving Day, a special time with family and friends when we pause to consider how blessed we are. Midlife, too, should be celebratory. It is a season in life for remembering and reflecting, a time to take pleasure in past and present abundance. Similarly, in midlife we begin to face the chilling fact of our own mortality.