The Quiet Art of Letting Go: Lessons from the Trees

Karin Sher
Nov 6, 2025
4 min read

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the word healing. It’s everywhere - in therapy, in conversations, in books, in the way we talk about growth. It’s a word we hold with so much hope, as if it contains the promise of becoming whole again.

But sometimes I wonder - what does it actually mean?

When something painful happens, the first thing we want to do is make it stop. We want to fix it, soothe it, move past it. Pain makes us restless. It asks questions we don’t want to answer. It breaks the illusion that things are permanent, that life is safe and predictable.

And yet, maybe that’s where healing begins. not in mending what was broken, but in staying with what feels impossible to stay with. I think about how hard it is to sit with someone else’s pain, or even with our own, without rushing to comfort or solve. In moments like that, something inside me wants to do something. To make it better. To find the right words. But often, the most human thing we can do is to simply be there. to witness. to allow.

Maybe healing isn’t about returning to what used to be. Maybe it’s about learning how to live inside what is. To sit with what can’t be cured, without trying to erase it. To stay open, even when it hurts.

Since moving to America, I’ve been thinking a lot about change. how visible it is here. how the seasons seem to breathe around you. Autumn especially has a way of speaking to me. The air shifts, the light softens, and the trees begin their slow surrender. They turn radiant - red, gold, orange - as if burning from within. Every walk feels like stepping into a painting. The ground becomes a tapestry of shapes and colors, layers of leaves curling and folding in on themselves. There’s a kind of quiet magic in it - the sound of leaves underfoot, the way sunlight filters through what’s left. It feels sacred, this fleeting beauty.

And then I remember what it really is: death. The leaves are dying. They fall so the tree can survive the winter.

Before that happens, something remarkable takes place - a quiet act of wisdom inside the tree. As the days grow shorter and the air cools, the tree begins to draw back what it can from each leaf - the sugars, the colors, the energy - tucking them safely into its trunk and roots for the long winter ahead. At the very place where each leaf meets the branch, a thin layer begins to form, gently loosening the bond between them. The tree is already preparing for goodbye. Before the leaf lets go, the branch seals itself, like closing a small door, so no harm will come when separation happens.

And when the wind finally comes, the leaf doesn’t really fall; it’s released. The letting go has already begun long before we see it.

And I think we’re like that too. Sometimes we change slowly - layer by layer, the way a tree releases its leaves. Other times, change arrives suddenly, without warning - like a storm that tears through everything familiar. Either way, something in us is asked to let go. Not always gently, not always with choice. But even then, there’s a kind of inner intelligence that begins to move - the part of us that seals what needs protecting, that draws strength from what remains.

Letting go isn’t always graceful. Sometimes it’s raw, messy, unwilling. And still, it happens. The process of becoming - of healing - holds space for both the quiet and the sudden, the soft surrender and the sharp break. Sometimes I notice how tightly we hold on - to people, to objects, to moments, to versions of ourselves. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s both. Letting go can feel like losing a part of who we are, and yet holding on too tightly can keep us from becoming who we’re meant to be.

Healing, I’m starting to think, isn’t something we reach once and for all. It’s more like an ongoing conversation - between the parts of us that want to hold on and the parts that are learning to release. Between what was and what’s beginning to take shape.

Maybe it’s not about finding real healing, but about noticing all the small ways healing already lives in us - in each breath we take after loss, in the quiet moments where we choose to stay open, even when it hurts.

Maybe healing isn’t about becoming whole again. Maybe it’s about learning to see beauty in what’s dying - the way we do in autumn.

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Autumn

by Karín Sher

The leaves know how to die.

They don’t question the wind

or cling to what they were.

They burn quietly

into red, into gold,

and let the wind take them.

The tree helps the leaf to die,

sealing the wound before goodbye.