In “Autumnal Tints,” Henry David Thoreau explores the fleeting beauty of autumn.
“October is the month of painted leaves,” he writes.
He also notes what an extraordinary event it is—a rare time when so much of the natural world changes all at once.
“What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed,” Thoreau writes. “If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.”
Thoreau’s thought mirrors Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation about the stars at night.
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Emerson writes in Nature. “But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."
If the changing of leaves happened only once in a lifetime, like some rare celestial event, people would stop their lives to see it in person. They’d make holy pilgrimages, write down the story of what happened, pass it on to future generations. It would be such a spectacle that those who didn’t experience it might find it hard to believe.
Instead, it happens every year. And that recurrence, in some ways, makes it easier to forget how astonishing it really is.
The same goes for Emerson’s stars. Something we see every night becomes the norm, then seems less remarkable.
The regularity of these spectacular occurrences shouldn’t diminish what they are. But when we experience something so often, it’s easy to value it less and less. When we're given an abundance of something exceptional, it’s easy to forget how wondrous it is in the first place.
In “Walking,” Thoreau offers another perspective after experiencing a particularly memorable November sunset in a meadow.
"When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still,” he writes.
As a father of three young kids, I think about this dynamic often. I know that the messy, chaotic mornings we have getting ready for school won’t last forever. Even though we’ve had hundreds of them, and there are likely hundreds to come, I know there's a finite number of these mornings.
In the moment, it's often difficult to be in that mindset. But afterward, when the bus has picked them up and it's off to school, the house is quiet, and my wife and I settle into our morning, it becomes clearer that these days are numbered.
If we had only one morning with our kids—just one, single morning to get ready for school—I'd want to pay as deep attention as possible to everything. How they look at me when they run down the stairs. How strong their hug is at the end of the driveway before they hop on the bus. How they run across the lawn with shoes untied and backpack unzipped in a frantic, beautiful mess.
But we’ve had hundreds of these mornings, and it’s hard to be present in each one with the same depth and devotion. They’re easy to rush through to get to what’s really happening that day.
The difference between the single morning and the countless mornings isn’t really in the morning itself, then. It’s in how closely I’m paying attention while it’s here.
A single morning's fleetingness suddenly becomes visible, even as the kids go through the same ordinary routine. That fleetingness is always there, though it's at a scale we don'talways see because the repetition of daily life makes it easy to forget to pay attention.
I don’t think it’s realistic to expect we can approach every moment of our lives with deep, undivided attention, as if it’s the last time we’ll experience it. We’re not wired that way.
But I think it’s worth noticing how regularity and recurrence can warp our sense of what’s profoundly rare. Having an abundance of something doesn’t make it less extraordinary.
In fact, you could argue that because we get to see the stars so often, watch the leaves turn every fall, and spend so many mornings with our loved ones, we’re surrounded by an abundance of remarkable experiences that’s difficult to really comprehend.
The fact that something happens again and again doesn’t make it any less worthy of our attention. I’d argue that the things that seem routine, regular, and constant are often where our attention drifts most.
They’re the moments or seasons we’re most likely to rush through, where we miss the thing we’re actually experiencing because we believe there will always be another chance to notice it.
Consider: What in your life happens so regularly that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is? If it only happened one more time, how would you want to experience it?