What "The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story of Life for All Ages" Taught Me About Living With Change After 60

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This time I read Leo Buscaglia's picture book The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story of Life for All Ages. Since leaving medical school for acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, and now splitting my year between Britain and Japan while tending the garden, this little book had sat unopened on my shelf for years — I had filed it away as something for children. Opening it again this time, I found it was written for children and, just as much, a letter to any adult trying to make peace with daily change. Here is a personal record of what I actually started doing after reading it.

An illustration imagining the moment Freddie, the story's main character, is born — still small and curled at the tip of a branch. Every practice here starts with this one leaf.

Practice one: accepting that no two leaves are alike

At first, Freddie assumes every leaf looks just like him.

At first Freddie thought every leaf was shaped the same, but before long he noticed that no two leaves were exactly alike. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

Even leaves born on the very same branch turn out to look nothing like each other.

I notice the same thing among the roses I grow in my English garden. I keep more than ten varieties in a single bed, all fed and watered the same way, and still every bloom opens differently, carries a different depth of scent. I've come to think ageing works the same way. There's no need to feel alarmed when I don't decline the way a friend my age does — no two leaves fall the same way to begin with.

Practice two: "That's a leaf's job too"

At the height of summer, when people crowd into the park looking for shade, Freddie and the others rustle their leaves to send a breeze their way.

"Freddie, that's a leaf's job too." — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

Simply being there, asking nothing in return, and becoming someone's shade — that counts as real work.

Since retiring, I had assumed that meaningful work, the kind with a title attached, was no longer available to me. Reading this line made me reconsider. Handing spare rose cuttings to a neighbour, or writing about life here for English-speaking readers — these are small jobs, no bigger than sending a breeze, but if they become someone's shade for a moment, that is enough.

Practice three: accepting that change itself is natural

As Freddie panics about the coming winter, his old friend Daniel tells him:

The world is always changing. Nothing stays the same. ... Dying is just one of the changes. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

This lands strikingly close to the Buddhist idea of impermanence — that nothing in the world holds still, and nothing is exempt from change.

After years as an individual investor, I still tense up on the days markets fall hard, treating the drop as some special emergency. Now, on those days, I try to recall this line instead. A market rising or falling is no more remarkable than a leaf changing colour — one more instance of an ordinary natural law. Framing it that way buys me one breath before I act on impulse. In Japan I go out to view the autumn leaves; in Britain I walk the woods to see the "autumn colours." It strikes me as a small, telling coincidence that two cultures each built a tradition around admiring the very same kind of change.

An illustration of a park where the trees turn gold, burnt orange, green, and deep green all at once. The rainbow of colours is meant to show that change itself is simply how nature works.

Practice four: making time to sit in the light, on purpose

One thing Freddie learns from the others is the etiquette of sunbathing.

They also learned it was best to stay still during sunbathing. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

The leaves stored up a day's strength simply by sitting still and receiving the light.

Eastern medicine has its own tradition of using light itself — light therapy. No special equipment is required; I now make a point of sitting for ten or fifteen minutes some mornings on the veranda or in the conservatory, doing nothing but receiving the light. Just as the leaves learned that stillness was the point, I've found that the real benefit of this habit comes from not bringing any task into that time at all.

Practice five: seeing friends off

As autumn deepens, Freddie's companions leave the branch one by one. Eventually even Daniel, his closest friend, departs quietly.

"Goodbye, Freddie." Daniel wore a look of quiet satisfaction and drifted away, slowly and calmly. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

There is more calm than fear in the scene, on both sides of the parting.

I'm told that from one's seventies onward, occasions of confronting the illness or death of friends and acquaintances become steadily more frequent. I'm not there yet myself, but these past few years I have already seen off several old friends. Since reading Daniel's scene, the way I receive that kind of news has shifted a little. The sadness doesn't go away, but I now find myself wondering whether the departure suited the person — whether it carried that same quiet satisfaction. Just imagining that lets a little calm into the grief.

Practice six: returning to the soil, feeding the next life

Near the end of the story, Freddie lands on the snow and learns that he will eventually dissolve into the soil and become part of what feeds the tree.

"Life" is preparing new leaves in places you cannot see — in the soil, in the roots, inside the tree itself. Nature's design never misses a single detail as it keeps "life" changing, without end. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

One leaf's life ends, but the tree it fed goes on.

Lately I notice how quickly I forget things I've just written down — memory and concentration aren't what they were. Still, what I write stays behind in the soil of this blog. I've stopped expecting replies or comments in return. Without aiming for a response, I hope that the record simply being there can become a small light for someone. Even if a reader forgets the words themselves, if something in them was quietly fed by what I left — that's enough.

A cross-section contrasting fallen leaves scattered above ground with a new bud quietly forming below, among the roots. What disappears from view is, out of sight, feeding the next life.

My own answer to "was it good that I was born"

Near the close of the book, Freddie asks Daniel whether it was worth being born at all. Looking back on the days they shared, Daniel answers:

How much fun that was. How happy that was. — from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

What is life, what is happiness, what were we born for — I've never had firm answers to questions that large. Finishing this book, though, I've come to think the answer lies less in what was accomplished and more in how much fun, how much happiness, those days actually held. I notice this way of seeing things settling into me now, in a way it never could have when I was young. Suffering and ageing haven't disappeared. Still — not fearing change, keeping a small role, sitting in the light, seeing friends off with care, leaving a record behind: what this little book says still reaches, quite directly, one retired gardener living under one tree.

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The World Leo Buscaglia Lived In

An illustration imagining a 1970s classroom with the desks pushed to the wall, instructor and students seated together in a circle on the floor — the kind of room Buscaglia's non-credit seminar "Love 1A" must have felt like.

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) was born in Los Angeles to Italian immigrant parents. He grew up around a large, noisy family table and in an immigrant community where neighbours were closely woven into one another's lives — an upbringing widely credited as the foundation of his later thinking. His career in education began as a special-education teacher working with children with disabilities, and he went on to teach at the University of Southern California.

The turning point came when one of his students died by suicide. Shaken by the loss, Buscaglia created a non-credit seminar called "Love 1A," in which students sat in a circle and spoke openly about love, life, and death. The class became famous, and the book that grew out of it, Love (1972), became a bestseller. He went on to become widely known through public-television lecture specials and picked up the nickname "Dr. Love."

The Fall of Freddie the Leaf was the only picture book Buscaglia wrote in his lifetime. As he states in the book's own dedication, it was written for "children who have faced the sadness of losing someone," for "adults who cannot find the right words to explain death," and for his editor, Barbara Slack. Buscaglia describes himself as a tree, and Barbara as "an irreplaceable leaf for these ten years." A man who spent his career speaking plainly about love and death from a lecture hall left, in the end, this one leaf's story for children and adults alike. He died in 1998 at the age of 74, of heart failure.