"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

The courage it takes to let go, and what happens when you can't quite bring yourself to do it.

Today marks 40 years since Ferris gave us that line... 40 years!

Yesterday, the last day of April, I walked through a park on my way to teach my weekly qigong class. The air was warm, a gift from this recent weather pattern, the light was magic. And the trees were doing what trees do in autumn, releasing their leaves, one by one, in their own quiet way and in their own time.

I noticed something, though. Not every tree was on the same schedule. Some had already shed almost everything. Others were still holding on, full and golden. And a few were barely beginning.

Each one entirely on its own timeline, entirely unbothered by the others.

Abscission (ab·sis·sion): The natural, biological process by which a tree releases its leaves. Not a failure. Not a loss. A deeply intelligent act of letting go, timed from within.

And then there's the opposite:

Marcescence (mar·ses·ence): The tendency of certain trees, some oaks, some beeches, to hold their dead leaves through winter instead of dropping them. The tree knows the leaf is gone. It keeps it anyway.

Go figure. Even trees have their own relationship with letting go.

There is something quietly heroic about releasing what you no longer need. It rarely looks dramatic from the outside, no fanfare, no applause. Just a person standing at the edge of something familiar, choosing to open their hands.

Last week, I was fortunate to attend Sorrento Writers Week, a conversation on death and Voluntary Assisted Dying, and the launch of a remarkable new book. The Power of Choice by award-winning photographer Julian Kingma is a deeply moving portrait of the people who choose VAD, and those who walk alongside them on that final journey. It's the kind of work that asks you to sit with the big questions rather than look away from them.

And sit with them I did. Because reading the intro took me straight back to my Dad's final days and final breath. Death is the ultimate form of letting go, and there is no negotiating with it. You are simply asked, demanded really, to open your hands and release what you love most.

A conversation I heard with philosopher A.C. Grayling added to my understanding of why this kind of loss cuts so deep:

"We experience death as grief. We experience dying as an act of living... death, non-existence, not being here, is no different from not having been conceived yet or born yet. The sort of horror that we associate with death, partly it's that we are no longer part of the story and we don't know what happens next." A.C. Grayling, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

We don't actually experience death as our own event. We experience it as grief, as the absence of someone in our story. The hole where they used to be. And perhaps that's what makes every act of letting go carry a shadow of it: we are rehearsing, in small ways, for that ultimate release.

Yet here is what I keep returning to: it is precisely because life can be taken from us, suddenly, without negotiation, that it reveals itself as so achingly beautiful. The ordinary moments. A conversation that runs too long. The weight of someone's hand. A tree, golden and unhurried, holding on for just a little longer. Death doesn't diminish any of this. It illuminates it.

We face letting go again and again throughout our lives, in quieter, slower ways that can be just as hard to navigate.

The child who no longer needs you in the same way. The relationship that unravels over months of small withdrawals, or traumatically overnight. The job that defined you, gone. The version of yourself you were so certain you'd become, fading. The life you imagined, finally acknowledged as what it always was: a story, not a plan.

Each of these is a loss. Each carries its own grief. And grief, as many of us discover, does not follow a tidy sequence. It circles. It resurfaces. It catches you off guard on a Tuesday.

"I've also come to learn that letting be can sometimes feel easier than letting go, and that maybe, for some things, that's enough."

Letting be is not giving up. It's a gentler form of release, allowing something to exist without needing to fix it, fight it, or force a resolution. Sometimes we're not ready to let go. Sometimes we're not supposed to be yet. And that deserves acknowledgment, too.

One of the most consistent things I hear from clients after a kinesiology session is how much lighter they feel. Not because anything external has changed, but because something internal has been allowed to move. Lightening the load does that. Making sense of your own inner world can be quietly, profoundly abscissinating.

What makes letting go so hard is that it asks us to trust what comes next, even when we can't see it. A particular kind of courage, not the loud, bold kind, but the quiet kind. The kind that shows up in an ordinary moment and says: I can put this down now.

It is autumn, after all. Nature knows best.

May 10 is Mother's Day, and for those of you carrying the absence of a mother you love, I'm sending love. Letting go of someone who shaped everything about you is its own particular kind of grief. May you find, in your own time, a way to hold her gently rather than tightly, and may that be enough.

Over to you:

Where are you right now, abscission or marcescence?

Are you releasing or holding your dead leaves through winter?

I'd love to hear what you're holding onto, and what it might feel like to finally shake your own tree.

Share your thoughts in the comments, or reach out if you'd like to explore this together.

And I'm curious, what have you learnt about letting go?

The Power of Choice

Julian Kingma, NewSouth Publishing, 2025

Award-winning photographer Julian Kingma spent 18 months travelling Australia to document something no-one had attempted before, the people who choose voluntary assisted dying, and the families and health professionals who walk alongside them. With forewords by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan, and more than 70 intimate portraits, this is a profound and visually stunning meditation on what it means to die well, and what constitutes a good death.