This time of year when leaves start to fall I recall a line I wrote which to this day bothers me.

“Life is the distance between a falling leaf and the ground.”

I loved that line. I was walking around home some years ago and it popped in my head. At the time I had been working on a piece called “Walled In” and the end of the essay digresses into a litany of “life is” comments. I added this as the last line of the piece, which tied back to the narrative about stepping away from society a la Thoreau. The Southern Humanities Review picked up the piece and when I received the final edits before press I wrote Dan Latimer, the editor at the time, and asked him to strike the last line. He did.

I am pretty sure it isn’t original. I googled it; I turned it in to turnitin.com, I tried everything. I don’t read that much so I looked through the few possible books I might find it, but nothing. I looked through poetry books, I called writers I know who actually do read books and asked them. I even, thinking it might have been in a passage read by a writer as a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” wrote the show asking if anyone there, namely host Terry Gross, remembered the line. They were nice enough to write back politely suggesting I might be having a mental breakdown. “But it is a great line!” I wanted to write back. I didn’t.

I remember an interview where Paul McCartney to this day is not convinced he is the author of the music for “Yesterday.” Unlike McCartney, I chose to strike the line. The piece went on to other outlets and has done very well through the years, including several anthologies, but san line. I was concerned someone would recognize it and know it wasn’t original, even though I’m pretty sure it is. My journalism training, however, requires me to be one hundred percent sure. “If you can’t back up your sources,” Dr. Jandoli repeated, “you don’t have a story.”

That might be in part why I slid away from journalism and into something more personal. I hate fact-checking. Instead, I found stories in life. Though to be honest I don’t know any writer who walks around looking for stories. We don’t stand in the middle of family circumstances or think about work issues or attend baseball games taking mental notes about some possible narrative arc.   

But those situations are always possible material. We never stop working. Either some digressive thought about an ongoing work, or a new work, or a very old work, crawls into our consciousness while we are watching television, or some quick phrase catches our attention and we know it is the beginning of or end of or transition to something. It is not on purpose; there is no attempt to blend writing and “life.” I swear. It just happens. We are always working.

An artist’s brain functions differently. A photographer goes for a walk and finds himself framing nature, a painter sees color schemes, a musician notices sounds, and writers, well, complete mental breakdowns from information overload is not out of the question. It is why we despise the comment: “You know what you should write about?” Go away. Did you really think we were sitting around thinking “I have no idea what to write about, I hope someone makes a suggestion”?

And we don’t actually “find” something to write about; it seeps into our existence like humidity or allergies. For me, I walk in the woods, or along the water, and the nature of nature is non-judgmental, absent of debate. I can walk for hours and my thoughts move through unattached to some human-inspired “suggestion” from a billboard or odd structure. It is organic, like leaves falling: thoughts let go and gather around.

Near my home at the river is a small strip of beach which changes with the weather and storms. Sometimes there is room enough to walk quite a ways along the water, and other times the river moves right to the edge of the swamp or rip rap and to continue means wading through the tide. In either case, I am always discouraged at my inability to communicate the perpetual reality of that tide, the infinite days the water will ebb and flow, and the significance of nature compared to the miniscule roll I play in this short span of decades. So I don’t even try. I “stand back and let it all be” as the Boss suggests. And the passing of time is enough some times.

That’s writing. A writer spends a great deal of time not writing. Not because we have nothing to write about, but because we have an absolute conviction we can never, ever do it justice.

Fall has arrived and the breezes this weekend cleared away most of what was left of summer. Last week at home I walked along the river like I always do this time of year when the water laps at my feet, it is warmer than the air, inviting, deceiving, teasing me into thinking summer will push back on autumn and maybe even win out. I don’t mind the change so much; I’m not bothered by the passing of time as much as how I spend the passing of time.

The truth is, some things need to change. Even with resistance, sometimes it is the only way to make room for new growth.

For me even the seasonal change from summer to fall is often troublesome. Again, I don’t mind fall—my days in western New York and Massachusetts are most memorable for this time of year. And obviously I know it is going to happen. I watch the weather, I mark the calendar, I see the leaves letting go. But still it always takes me by surprise. I wake up one day and I need to wear more clothes, or I no longer feel the sun so strong on my shoulders, and I am saddened.

So when a change is even more unexpected, like anyone else I wonder how I am going to handle it. And the surest way—for me anyway—to gauge my reaction to life being different or accepting some sort of radical, unexpected shift in existence is to look back to when these things have happened before.

I’ve never lived a conventional life.

Like that time we moved away from what had been “home” when I was eight or so. In kindergarten I liked a little red-haired girl, Kathleen. Just like Charlie Brown I was afraid to approach her. We were in the same class until third grade when at the end of the school year my family moved much further out on the Island. Instead of saying goodbye to her I made a card that said, “I love you” and threw it at her in the hallway. I think she got it. Now I wish I had just handed it to her politely and said I was sorry I was moving. I never saw her again. I probably didn’t handle that relationship well.

But I liked moving. I liked heading to somewhere new, and even at eight I sensed the need to see it as an adventure instead of a radical shift in life. Man, was I innocent. Again, I was eight. But the times were simpler, not because of how old I was but how more focused we were, as if we still were growing, getting stronger. I don’t feel that way about society anymore. It’s like we peaked quite some time ago, and now we keep trying to invent new ways of regaining that hope we had. A line from a favorite song of mine says, “Can you picture a time when a man had to find his own way through an unbroken land?” Imagine that for a second. No satellite photos, no GPS, no maps and indicators, no sextant, nothing but perhaps some paths beaten by cattle or floods. Wild, but filled with hope.

In some ways that’s all of us in our youth. Personally, I often ignored advice of my older siblings, examples set down on television or in school. I simply preferred to assess a situation and have at it on my own terms, even if it meant complete and utter disaster. Once I walked three blocks from home just to play with a friend’s plastic bowling pin set. I was eight. Another time I decided to hike into the San Jacinto Mountains outside Palm Springs without telling my parents, or anyone for that matter. I missed the small sign that said “Danger: Rattle Snake Area. Keep Out.” What a beautiful hike that was until I fell into a Saguaro cactus and spent an extra hour on a rock pulling thorns out of my leg. What a great day. I think there are too many signs telling us what not to do, too many limitations, and maybe that’s from the technology; I really don’t know. But I know this: we went outside and escaped the very notion of limitation. Our imaginations were limitless, and we “searched” the wilds of our world. Okay, I suppose it was more dangerous. But as Lily Meola wrote of daydreams and imagination: “It’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you.“

So maybe I should be dead. Or abducted. Or in juvi for harrassing an eight year old girl. Instead, I gained that small bit of confidence we used to earn out on our own, trying and failing, fantasizing and acting and pretending. You simply never know when those youthful lessons will return to come in handy, see us through an unexpected left-turn, help us through the changes.

I thought about those years, my early youth in Massapequa Park on Long Island, and how innocent it all was; how we flipped baseball cards and played stickball. We had block parties where the block would be closed to traffic and we all put picnic tables and grills out and walked up and down the street talking to everyone else and sharing food, and riding bikes, and the adults had drinks and the kids had fun. Television went off the air at night, just a fuzzy white noise until the early morning when a black and white flag waved across the screen and some dude said, “We now begin our broadcast day” after the National Anthem.

This was the age of my youth. It was innocent and tech-free and filled with hippies and protests and flag-burning and marches and sit-ins and rumbles. The laughable Mets became the champs and we walked on the moon. On the moon, for God’s sake. How can you possibly not understand why at the core of my generation is some semblance of hope, still simmering. We were not a generation of followers staring at our hands; not by any stretch of the imagination. So when the times were a ‘changing, we changed—or we were the ones causing the change to begin with. And as we grew older, those organic traits became part of our DNA.

Note: No, I’m not reminiscing or longing for the days of my youth. Not at all, Just the sense of hope we had that seems to be missing now. If there was anything I look back there for, it is that. Part of who we are is absolutely dependent upon how we were when we were young. And when I was young I was restless, always ready for something new. I didn’t mind our move away from the Little Red-Haired girl. I didn’t mind the move to Virginia. But I’m saddened by the slow erosion of hope, the dilution of imagination.

Everything needs to change, and it scares the hell out of me, so I could use a bit of that eight-year-old gumption right about now.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going.”

–Lao Tzu