Seasonal Changes

Have you ever seen the Harrison Ford film Random Hearts? He plays a detective, happily married, or so he believes, until his wife dies in a plane crash and he learns she'd been living a second life he knew nothing about. But that's not really why I'm bringing it up. I'm bringing it up because of a piece of music in it, an instrumental called "Seasonal Changes."

In the film, that piece scores a montage. A mother and daughter, and the seasons turning behind them, summer into fall into winter. The music was written to do exactly that, to carry you through time, to move a life forward while you sit still and watch it pass.

And I swear, every time I hear it, it does the same thing to me. It picks me up and moves me through my own seasons.

It set me down, the other day, in 1999. I was younger then, at the start of something. I was preparing to marry a woman named Soo Young Kim. We'd found each other the year before, and that summer felt like the beginning of the whole rest of my life. We married in 2000.

By 2003 we had separated. By 2004 it was over.

I can say that out loud now without the deep sorrow it brought me when it first happened, and it took me a long time to get there. For years, that part of my life, that season if you will, felt like a failure. And maybe it was, but it also wasn't. It was growth. It was learning who I was and what I could withstand, even if I couldn't see it that way at the time. But that's not what the music does when it carries me back there. It doesn't take me to the ending. It takes me to a summer, a real one, with real warmth in it, and then it keeps moving, the way it was always going to, the way the montage always did. Summer into fall into winter.

Because that's the thing about seasons. They change. That's not the sad part. That's the whole design. Summer was never going to stay summer. And the winters, the ones that felt like they'd never lift, they didn't stay either. Every hard season I've ever been sure I'd be stuck in eventually turned, and became something else, and led somewhere I couldn't have seen from inside the cold.

I know that now in a way I couldn't have known it at thirty-three, standing in the wreckage of a marriage, certain I'd done something unforgivable to my own life. I hadn't. I'd just lived through a season, and the season had changed, the way they do.

It kept changing, too. It carried me through years I won't lay out here, more summers, more winters, until eventually it set me down in this one, the one with Lyn in it, the one where everything feels like it's beginning again. And I've learned enough by now to hold even this loosely. Not because I expect it to end, but because I finally understand that holding a season loosely is the only honest way to hold it at all. You love it while it's here. You let it be what it is.

You trust the next one to come.

That's what the music gives me. Not just a memory, and not just the pull to write, though it gives me both. It reminds me that I've been through the turning enough times now to trust it. That nothing stays. That the cold always breaks eventually.

The piece was written to move a life from summer to winter in the space of a few minutes. Mine's taken fifty-nine years, and it isn't done. But I've stopped bracing against the changes the way I used to.

The seasons turn. They always have. I'm finally at peace with letting them.