A Season of Shedding

I have been thinking about trees and how, in certain seasons, they shed their leaves because shedding is part of the cycle. There are seasons for growth and seasons for letting go. Seasons when energy is directed outward and seasons when it is conserved. Sometimes shedding is part of preparing for what comes next.

During my conversation with Josephine Okui Ossiya for In Her Element, we spoke about what stepping into greater leadership and authority has given her. Opportunity. Influence. Fulfilment. The satisfaction of taking everything she has learned and accumulated over many years and putting it to work in a position of significant responsibility. But then we spoke about the other side: the loneliness that can accompany leadership, the challenge of maintaining relationships as responsibilities increase, and the expectations that can accompany success, including what she calls “black tax.”

Listening to Josephine made me think about my own choices. Over the last few years, one of those choices has been KaraSpace. I have become increasingly clear about what I want it to be: a place where people gather, connect, create and play. A place where people can make things, eat, talk, think, rest and enjoy being together. It is something I genuinely enjoy.

But choosing to build it has required more of me than I understood at the beginning. I have had to learn a sector and business, had to spend more time inside the business, on spreadsheets and learning operational details. I have had to learn how to let staff go, even after investing in them. I have had to learn how to learn again. And all of this takes something: time, attention, emotional energy and money. These are finite resources. The time I give to KaraSpace cannot simultaneously be given somewhere else, and that has meant that there are relationships I could have expanded but haven’t. There are friendships I would have liked to give more time to. There are opportunities that, at another point in my life, I might have pursued.

Not because those things no longer matter to me. They do. But I am beginning to understand that choosing something also means choosing what I do not give time to. We tend to think of growth as addition, and particularly in midlife, we have accumulated a lot. We have careers, families, friendships, professional networks, community responsibilities, businesses, interests, causes we care about, bodies that need looking after, people who depend on us and perhaps dreams we still haven’t pursued. Then something new calls us. And our instinct is often to ask: How do I fit this in too? But perhaps that is not always the right question. Perhaps sometimes the question is:

What needs to make room for this?

This is where the image of shedding has become useful to me. Because shedding can sound like loss. And I don’t think everything we set aside in one season is lost. There are things I am saying no to now that I may say yes to later. There are relationships that may receive less of my time now and more of it in another season. There are ideas sitting in notebooks waiting for their time. Something may have to give without being given up. There is a question that I have heard particularly directed at women: Can we have it all? My favourite answer to this is, yes, we can have it all, just not at the same time. So, I think that we need to be able to recognise what each particular season is asking us to hold.

During my conversation with Josephine, I found myself saying that different seasons require different rhythms. I have kept returning to that thought. A rhythm is not simply a schedule, but deciding what gets our best energy in a particular season, and what you are consciously allowing to wait. Perhaps finding our rhythm requires some shedding.

I think this is particularly important during life transitions. When something falls away, we can be quick to interpret it as failure. The friendship changed, or we declined an opportunity, or became less visible. Sometimes we have simply moved into another season, and need to stop maintaining a version of ourselves that no longer fits. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough room for everything we have accumulated. And sometimes the shedding itself creates the space in which something else can grow.

A tree sheds its leaves, but the story does not end with the shedding. There will be another season. There will be new growth.

And perhaps part of living well is learning not only when to reach for what is next, but when to make room for it.

What is this season asking you to give yourself to?

And what might you need to let rest for a while?