You Can’t Win Against the Leaves

 

A reader sent me a poem after my last piece, the one about the grass that grows by itself. It’s short, and it’s about autumn instead of spring, but it’s clearly a cousin of the same idea.

秋风落叶乱为堆，扫尽还来千百回。

The autumn wind blows the fallen leaves into messy piles. Sweep them all away and they come back hundreds and thousands of times.

一笑罢休闲处坐，任他着地自成灰。

Laugh, let it go, and sit somewhere quiet. Let them lie on the ground and turn to dust on their own.

You can picture the whole thing: a courtyard, a broom, and a tree that won’t cooperate. Every pass clears a patch of ground, and by the time you reach the far side, the wind has refilled the spot where you started. The poet didn’t have to stretch anything to make this a metaphor. That’s just what sweeping leaves in autumn is like.

The poet is 南怀瑾 (Nán Huáijǐn), a widely read teacher of Buddhist and Daoist thought in the Chinese-speaking world. He wrote it as one of seventeen short verses in his commentary on the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, 楞严大义今释, and came back to it years later when lecturing on another text, the 圆觉经. It’s become one of his best-known verses, often read as a teaching on 歇心 (xiē xīn), resting the mind.

In one lecture he describes young monks in mountain temples sweeping the courtyard clean, only to have a gust of wind bring down a fresh pile the moment they finish. Our 妄念 (wàngniàn), the stray thoughts that keep showing up, are exactly like those leaves, he says. And his advice is plain: don’t press them down, and don’t go looking for a method to clear them out. Laugh, drop the broom, and sit.

That runs against what most of us do when we’re trying to feel calmer. A difficult thought shows up, so we argue with it. A regret surfaces, so we replay it, and when a worry arrives we try to reason our way out. Sometimes that works for a minute, and then another thought blows in the way another leaf always does. So we end up sweeping the same patch of courtyard over and over, calling it progress because our arms are tired.

A different question

One of the approaches I use most in my counseling work is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, and one reason I like it is that it asks a different question.

Most of us ask, “How do I make this thought go away?” ACT asks, “Can this thought be here while I keep moving toward what matters?”

That shift changes a lot. The intrusive worry, the old argument you keep replaying, the voice insisting you should be doing more: none of them have to be solved, defeated, or believed before you take the next useful step. They can be there while you keep living.

Pushing thoughts away is just another kind of sweeping, and usually a less effective one. In Daniel Wegner’s well-known “white bear” studies in the late 1980s, people who were told not to think about a white bear ended up thinking about it more once they stopped trying. Believing every thought that shows up goes wrong in the other direction, and that’s how you end up buried under the leaves. ACT calls the middle ground cognitive defusion: noticing a thought as something passing through, instead of a fact you have to act on. Nan’s poem gets there in four lines. Laugh, stop, sit down, and let the leaves settle in their own time.

A yard in upstate New York

This time of year always makes me homesick for fall in New York. I miss apple cider donuts, corn mazes, and haunted houses, and yes, I’m that person who wants pumpkin spice in everything. Halloween is still my favorite holiday, and I’ve never seen another country do it like the US. Fall is the season I miss most, and much of that longing takes me back to my parents’ yard, where I learned that a job doesn’t have to be finished for the afternoon to be a good one.

Autumn there meant something specific. The maples turned red before anything else, the oaks followed in quieter oranges and browns, and for a few weeks the whole neighborhood was a color you couldn’t find again until the next fall season.

My parents would hand me a rake and send me outside. By the time I’d worked my way across the yard, the spot where I started was covered again. The pine needles especially never cooperated. They slipped right through the rake and settled down into the grass, and no amount of raking ever got all of them.

What nobody mentions when they hand you the rake is that the piles were the best part. My two younger sisters and I would jump in, scatter everything across the grass, climb out laughing, and rake it back up so we could do it again. Only once we’d worn ourselves out would we bag it all and call it a day.

Nan’s poem starts with a laugh, and so did most of our afternoons in that yard. We never waited for the grass to be clear before we jumped in, and the leaves kept falling the whole time we played. The yard was never finished. We just decided when we were done.

I think about that whenever someone tells me they’re trying to reach a perfectly quiet mind. Wanting your thoughts to stop arriving is like wanting the leaves to stop falling, and some of them are always going to be pine needles, slipping through no matter how many times you pass over them. The more useful question is how to live with what they bring up.

Homesickness rarely shows up alone. Somewhere between missing cider donuts and counting the weeks to Thanksgiving, a bigger question tends to blow in: what if choosing to build my life abroad ends up costing me something I can’t see yet? I’ve swept up that one more times than I can count. I list the reasons I came, I run through the what-ifs, I argue my case, and for a day or two the yard looks clear. Then the wind picks up again. These days I try something closer to what the poem suggests. I let the question sit there, notice it the way I’d notice another leaf landing, and keep doing the things that brought me here in the first place. It hasn’t gone away, and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

Putting the broom down

The more time I spend with this poem, the less I think it’s about meditation and the more I think it’s about control.

Some things in life can be finished: a tax return, a meal, a bookshelf you put together on a Sunday afternoon. Other things keep going, like parenting, relationships, wondering whether you made the right call about where to live, and learning to live with your own mind. Keeping every unwanted thought out of your head belongs in that second group, so the job was never to finish it. The job is deciding when today’s effort has been enough, and then putting the broom down without treating that as a failure.

The leaves are still falling, and they probably always will. These days I spend less energy trying to clear the whole yard and more time asking the question my sisters and I answered without thinking every fall: how much is enough for today?

Sometimes the answer is to keep raking. Sometimes it’s to drop the rake and jump in the pile.

About the author

Courtney Gumson, LMSW, is a counselor and executive function coach based in Shenzhen. She works with adults and teens on a wide range of mental health concerns, including anxiety, stress, and life transitions, with a particular focus on ADHD.

Where to find her

• Free mental health consultations at the Shekou MSCE, every other Tuesday from 4 to 6 pm
• Counseling at Distinct Clinic 卓正医疗, Shekou and Futian locations

Or you can contact her directly:
Website: eftakeoffcoachingcg.com
Email: [email protected]

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