But something other than that took me to Japan. Unlike in Britain, where I was born, and the United States, where I grew up, the citizens of my adopted home have been encouraged by their distinctive traditional culture to be quiet, to remain invisible, to try to look and sound like everyone else. The one thing others don’t much need, they know, is the loud impress of personality. Since I’d been trained to babble, I thought, when choosing to move to Japan, that it might be a good thing to go somewhere where I could learn to listen. Since I’d been encouraged at school to try to be an individual, it didn’t seem a terrible thing to learn to be quite typical. Becoming myself, I realized, might not involve anything more than becoming more like everyone around me.

When I met the woman who would become my wife in a Kyoto temple three weeks after I arrived in 1987, of course it was everything that I assumed to be distinctive, unique, even foreign in her that pulled me, much as she was surely drawn by the foreignness in me. But as we pass into a deeper season in our lives, we come to see that the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last; from Vermont to Beijing, people relish autumn days precisely because they’re reminders of how much we cannot afford to take for granted, and how much there is to celebrate right now, this shining late September afternoon.

I could have learned this anywhere, no doubt, but in Japan the seasons are treated with the sort of passion and reverence usually associated with religion. Every time the cherries begin to blossom, people flock into the parks because, in 10 days or so, the frothing pink flowers will be gone; and every time the maple leaves blaze in late November, my Japanese friends and family throng into temple gardens in much the same spirit that people of any faith may gather in temples or cathedrals. To be joined in a congregation; to be reminded of something larger than ourselves, keeping us in place; to catch moments of light in a season of mounting darkness.

I love the sunshine when I visit my mother in Southern California, but I can’t say I love the fact that February and August are growing interchangeable. It’s the end of things, Japan has taught me, that gives them their savor and their beauty. And it’s the fact that my wife — and I — are always changing, even as we’re shedding leaves and hair, that confers an urgency on my feelings toward her. Every year the autumn reminds me that progress doesn’t move in a straight line and that I’m not necessarily wiser than I was last year — or 30 years ago. Every year, autumn sings the same tune, but to a different audience.

My first year in Japan, I wrote a book about my enraptured discovery of a love, a life and a culture that I hoped would be mine forever. My publishers brought out my celebration of springtime romance in autumn. Now, 28 years on, I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.

Pico Iyer is the author of “Autumn Light” and, most recently, “A Beginner’s Guide to Japan.”

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments” and “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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