I remember when fall was something you experienced (back in the late 1900's - ha).
You could smell and hear fall before you saw it. Leaves crackling beneath your shoes, dry and papery, skittering across the sidewalk when the wind came through. Woodsmoke curled over the rooftops, carrying that sweet, dark smell of somebody's first fire of the season. The air had a bite to it, clean and cold enough to wake you up. At the Friday night football game, the field lights turned the October darkness silver, and the band sent brass and drums rolling into the stands. Your hands wrapped around a paper cup of hot apple cider, the steam warming your face. You pulled your sweatshirt tighter because you had underestimated the cold, and somewhere nearby a mother was unfolding a blanket while somebody's dad was hollering at the referee as if the fate of civilization depended on the third quarter. Fall wasn't something you decorated. It wasn't an aesthetic. It wasn't a lifestyle. It was something you stepped into. Something you could hear, smell, taste, touch and feel. It was just fall.
Then, somewhere along the way, we started buying the feeling.
Pumpkin spice everything. Fall candles. Fall mugs. Fall decorations. Fall outfits. Fall signs. Fall playlists. We were taught to associate a feeling with a product, and then the product became the way we accessed the feeling.
That's what I mean by a Happiness Hijacker. It doesn't necessarily have to take something away from us. Sometimes it simply gets between us and the thing that was making us happy in the first place.
The Happiness Hijackers figured out that fall could be packaged and sold back to us. And because we're human, we're remarkably easy to persuade. We want to belong. We want to be somebody. We want to be better. We want to feel in control. We want to believe we're living the good life. The 5 Bs are powerful human desires, and there's nothing wrong with them. The trouble begins when somebody else gets to decide what they are supposed to look like.
So we buy the candle. We buy the sweater. We buy the pumpkin-spice latte. We create the perfect fall atmosphere, and somewhere in the middle of all that buying, we can forget to actually experience the season.
Maybe we don't need another thing.
Maybe we need to walk through the leaves. Go to the football game. Drink the cider. Sit on the porch. Listen to the band. Watch the sunset come earlier. Let the woodsmoke find you.
Because perhaps the Happiness Hijackers' greatest trick isn't convincing us to want things we don't need. Maybe it's convincing us to buy things we could have simply experienced.
Fall was never something we had to purchase.
It was waiting for us outside.
What did fall mean to you before someone started selling it to you?
