What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
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“Wonderful autumn! My soul is bound to him. If I were a bird, I would fly around the world looking for autumn…” wrote the British writer George Eliot almost 200 years ago. And on the net today it says: “Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf becomes a flower.”
So it’s that time again – the equinox has come: another word for autumn. While most aren’t as euphoric about the start of this season as the English poet, there’s no reason to be sad.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
The beauty of the third half of the year has inspired poets from all over the world to write verses – here are perhaps the best-known and most beautiful lines. They come from the Stuttgart poet Eduard Möricke (1804 – 1875):
The world still rests in the fog, Forest and meadows still dream; soon you will see, when the veil falls, the undisguised blue sky, the muffled world of autumn flowing in warm gold.
Autumn begins in our hearts, not on the calendar. We are just finding out that day and night are almost the same length – isn’t that like a parable of our lives? We can always look forward to one, the beautiful side. But we also know the other, the dark one. And because we know that, we need not fear it.
What makes autumn so special? It reflects the fullness of life like no other time. Nature’s color explosion, warm yellow and orange everywhere; colorful leaves, pears and plums, beautiful days in “Indian Summer”. And a magic hovers over everything that only exists in these weeks. And maybe this: You’re never too old to run through a pile of leaves.
Let’s enjoy autumn together, the season for the soul.
* Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittel-shop.de.