Reflections on Autumn in Santiago

All of a sudden, it´s late fall in Santiago. It´s chilly and the sun sets early and shines weakly during the day.

Fall has always been my favorite season. It fills me with nostalgia for my childhood. Every year on the first day of school, I´d take a walk by myslef around the hilly, tree-lined street below my parents´ house, crunching leaves and wondering at the passage of time, imagining who I would be when I was grown. And now I´m grown and I think about what the world looked like to me when I was a child and I think about what the world will look someday to my children. What I like about children, what I liked about being a child, is that the world seems both unimaginably ancient and always new. It´s worth remembering.

Fall makes me sad, but it´s a peaceful kind of sad. It´s the kind of sad that leaves me with the certainty that life is good, that the world is good, despite the limitations of our own modest gifts and our mortality.