You Don't Need an Autumn Bucket List

At some point, October acquired a syllabus.

Visit the pumpkin patch.

Pick apples.

Bake something involving cinnamon.

Watch the approved cozy films, in the approved order.

Drink cider, ideally while photographing leaves.

Attend a farmers market.

Wear a sweater while doing all of the above, preferably one that photographs well.

And if November shows up before you've made homemade soup with Practical Magic playing in the background?

Apparently you have failed autumn.

Ma'am. It is a season. There will not be an exit interview.

The seasonal bucket-list industrial complex

There's nothing wrong with wanting to go apple picking.

Orchards are nice.

Cider is nice.

If any of this sounds fun to you, go do it.

The weird part is when watching someone else do it makes you feel behind.

Social media hands us a few hundred people's individual autumn highlights, and somewhere in our brains they merge into one imaginary person who did all of it, in one October, in coordinated flannel.

Nobody is actually doing all of this.

Not even the person who posted it.

She also has a sink full of dishes and a kid who won't eat dinner.

You just didn't see that part.

When enjoyment becomes completion

There's a subtle difference between:

"I'd love to do that this fall."

and

"We haven't done that yet."

That yet is doing a lot of quiet damage.

It turns a preference into a debt.

Suddenly October has KPIs, and you're behind on a season you didn't sign up to complete.

You cannot miss a season you're currently living through

Maybe you didn't visit an orchard.

But you noticed the first cold morning.

You pulled out a sweater you hadn't worn since March.

You drove past trees going brilliant and orange on your way to buy groceries, not because you set out to admire them, but because they were simply there, being autumn at you.

You ate something warm because the house had finally gone cold enough to want it.

That counts. Actually, there is no "counts."

That's the whole point.

You're not filling in a bingo card.

You're just alive in October, which was never a task to begin with.

Notice, don't complete

Maybe the bucket list isn't the problem.

Maybe it's the word list itself, sitting there implying something to check off, something to finish.

Try something far less ambitious instead: pay attention.

Autumn doesn't need to be completed.

It just needs to be lived while it's here, whether or not you photographed it.