Falling trees, growing kids, and how to cope with change.
Takeways
- Read an original essay inspired by the back-to-school season, all about how you can’t control life’s unceasing changes, but you don’t have to — your responsibility is only human-sized.
- Check out the new edition of my research column for bpHope about the links between bipolar disorder (and other mental health conditions) and physical health, including new science on inflammation, hepatitis C, and high blood sugar.
- Learn why I recommend the books Stone Yard Devotional, Essential Judaism, and North Woods this month.
For the past four Augusts, my parents have rented a house in Door County, Wisconsin. It’s located on the lake side of the peninsula — along the wild, rocky shore.
The land where the house now sits was once forest. The builders left a screen of evergreens between the lake house and the water. About two dozen of them. This year, the week before we arrived, a big storm came through, pulling down five of those trees.
When we drove up, you could see the missing 20 percent right away. The view was different, and the difference felt sad.
It felt sad because, to me, it was less beautiful. Because it connotated climate change. But I think even more than those was the fact that it said: Nothing ever stays the same.
My animal heart doesn’t like to hear this. But it’s true. It’s hard to be a creature who not only has to navigate change, but has to know that I am navigating it.
The season makes this reality particularly plain. It’s the time of year when you can spy the first red-kissed leaves nestled in the still-lush maples. I know summer is ending.
I know, too, that my oldest child is about to begin his fifth-grade year. After the trees bud in the spring, he’ll never attend our neighborhood elementary school again.
My middle child will start second grade. On Monday, I opened the school’s digital portal to discover that he won’t have the same teacher his brother did, whom we all adored.
My youngest, who is entering his last year of preschool, just got his hair cut in his signature pageboy. I wonder how many haircuts we have left until he asks for it short like his brothers.
None of these examples constitute tragedies. I know this. In fact, you could rightly say these are expected — even hoped-for — mile-markers in a rich life.
If you’re lucky, your babies grow up and into themselves. There are much worse things. Seeing it coming is a privilege.
But it’s painful, too. Because it’s so clear that you can’t control it. You can press ahead or push back with all your might, and it doesn’t make a difference. Existence unfolds at its own pace, whether you want it to or not.
Powerless and small, I can’t control what happens.
But also: I don’t have to.
Kids grow. Seasons change. Trees fall. And I am released. I only need to do what I can do. My responsibility is human-sized.
The sun sets. But it rises, too. And — blessedly — I don’t control any of it.
My Latest Writing
The longer I keep my fingers on the pulse of mental health research, the more clearly I feel the drumbeat running through many lines of research: Mental health conditions are whole-body health conditions whose hallmark symptoms are emotional and behavioral.
In the most recent edition of my column for bpHope, you can read about how bipolar disorder (and other mental health diagnoses) are linked with autoimmune diseases, viruses, blood sugar regulation, and more: Bipolar Research & Insights: Inflammation, Hep C, High Blood Sugar, and More | August 2025.
Book Recommendations
Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood
An atheist joins a convent. It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s the premise of Stone Yard Devotional – a work of psychological fiction with autobiographical elements that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Told with the intimacy of a diary, the unnamed, elder narrator opens her mind and heart as she undergoes a personal reckoning with her past, reflecting on themes of moral responsibility, forgiveness, grief, and our Sisyphean efforts to do no harm.
Stone Yard Devotional is a quiet book. It is meditative. It’s the kind of novel you sink into slowly enough that you think you might close it and walk away since nothing much is really going on anyway, only to find that, actually, you’re stuck down deep. The sentences and thoughts are spare. The narrator’s reflections lay bare her heart. You’ll want to read every word.
Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals (Updated Edition), by George Robinson
Our world is changing fast, and misinformation is everywhere. The combination has me turning toward the study of history. I want to understand how what came before influences how things are now. And knowing this context helps me feel more capable of interpreting our media environment, identifying faulty logic, and spotting AI-garbage.
Essential Judaism is a book that addresses these wishes, along with the selfish one to understand myself a little better (I’m half Ashkenazi). Covering “essentially” everything Jewish — from what happens in a service, to a sweeping history of the Jews, to Jewish philosophy, to controversies among Jews about Israel as a political state — this one filled in a lot of gaps for me.
A bookseller at one of my favorite bookstores tried to talk me into buying this book shortly after it came out in 2023. It’s the story of a house over three centuries, she said. Frankly, I did not get the appeal. I enjoy House Hunters as much as the next person, but did I want to read a novel about a house? When I hear that, really, New York City is the central character of a book, I pass. I’m just not drawn to place as a protagonist. It’s people I care about.
Of course, now that I’ve read it, I understand that North Woods is also a book about people. It’s like a multigenerational family novel, where the idea of family is expansive. It includes humans, yes, and also animals, beetles, and ghosts. Each who passes through the yellow house is impacted by everything that’s come before without fully understanding that fact. But as readers, we can see it. It’s a book about America, time, and the unseen forces that shape us. And that bookseller was right, I loved it.
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