​The leaves have been changing color the past few weeks. Actually, probably a bit longer than that. How you see it depends on your perception.
 
It may seem like they haven’t been changing much. Or, it may seem like WHAMMO, suddenly green has become brown and leaves crumble, drop and blow away.
 
How we perceive this change during the fall season struck me recently because of the leaves going from green to yellow, red and orange. One day it seemed like nothing was going on. Then, suddenly the leaves fell off the branches. There was no in-between (or so it seemed).
 
I pride myself on paying attention to the seasons, knowing when frigid winds will hit, when the last snow will fall in late April, how long I can golf into early December. There are barometers that stand out and give you a strong sense of what to expect next when it comes to temperature, winds and precipitation.
 
Leaves changing colors is one of those barometers. It’s why it appeared strange to me watching for the transformation, and having this sense that nothing was happening.

Perhaps that is all in my head. It could be the leaves changed more slowly this year due to weather patterns, and lack of moisture the past few months. I’m no expert.
 
I felt like I was watching closely, and in retrospect, I think that was my problem. When you want something, expect something to happen, it seems to take much longer for it to actually occur. Like waiting for Christmas. You can’t wait, then suddenly it’s Christmas morning and all those presents under the tree.
 
Maybe that’s how my perception of this fall was colored. I kept waiting and waiting for the visually stunning mixture, the kaleidoscope of leaves, to hit. When it didn’t seem to take a logical progression, I probably averted my eyes and attention span for 3, 7, 11 days.
 
You can’t do that. Because the shift is gradual, you miss the nuance. Every day something is subtly different. You must pay close attention to see it.
 
It’s a good life lesson – paying attention. That’s where you see and learn. Get complacent and stuff flies by.
 
You can easily grow bored of day-to-day humdrum – waiting for leaves to change. Kind of like watching the pot closely to see when it boils. If you look into the water, you start to see tiny bubbles, then they float upward, then finally they get bigger and burst the surface to let you know it’s time to put the noodles in.

If you keep looking at the pot though, it seems like this takes forever. You avert your eyes and go make a salad, and when you come back, the water is boiling away.
 
We miss things when we step away like that. Cooking intervention. Leaf-watching intervention. Life intervention.
 
Step away and you miss something. We can’t always be right on top of things at all moments.
 
For the leaf-changing season though, you’ll miss it if you take a few days here or there to look away and get too focused on getting through the day.
 
Keep your eyes open. Breathe deeply. Look closely. Enjoy the change.

​At our recent high school reunion, several of us regaled others with incidents that detailed our aging process – driving more and more slowly, becoming the “old man” holding up traffic by driving five MPH BELOW the speed limit. Our conversation revolved around situations we’d encountered in the recent past, and how we couldn’t believe how tentative we were becoming depending on the weather, road conditions, the number of cars on the road and whether it was night.
 
I started the complaining by describing my drive around Chicago, taking I-294, a notorious toll road perpetually under construction and littered with speedy drivers not encountered outside the metro area. Coming down to Illinois from Wisconsin, the change in pace is immediately apparent.
 
Instead of most drivers using a steady pace at X MPH over the speed limit, you are instantaneously affected by the ultra-speedsters. These are those individuals training to drive in the Indianapolis 500.
 
You see them coming up from behind you in your rearview mirror. You go to yourself, “HOLY, SH….., I better pull over.” Weaving in and out to find any way possible to get ahead of you, using their car like a missile launch, you pull over to the far right to drink their jet fuel exhaust as they barrel by.
 
Often, the first car is followed by others. The lead person enables others. They fall in line. It becomes a flock of 3, 4, 5, 8 cars in a row blasting by, all of them 20+ MPH over the speed limit, at a minimum. Your heart rate and blood pressure rise as you feel them coming up on you. Your old codger attitude doesn’t like it.
 
Semi’s do much the same thing to your fear factor. For two years, I commuted a stretch of the Wisconsin interstate while it was under construction and down to two lanes, where four was the norm. The two lanes were encased tightly by those concrete barriers, with no emergency pull-off room.
 
Almost daily during that commute, a semi would drift into your lane. Ever so slowly creeping into your space as your stomach clenched, knowing you had no room to shift away because your vehicle would hit the concrete barrier.
 
Sometimes you could speed up quickly and get ahead. Frequently that was not an option because another semi in front and one in back boxed you in. You hoped and prayed. Somehow, I avoided any crashes during that time period.
 
Incidents like these raise your fears, particularly as you get older. You slow down, sense your mortality, recognize that others aren’t paying attention to the road, or don’t care. You must protect yourself.
 
In our high school reunion discussion, we found ourselves recounting these stories and how “all those old people” you saw on the road were rapidly becoming us. You get yellow glasses to wear at night and in the rain to cut down on glare. They work. I know because I bought a pair.

Like the friend noted above, you become the person holding up traffic by driving under the speed limit to your teeming metropolis with a population of 3,600 residents. Others honk, and you ignore them. “I’m making sure I get there safely.”
 
There’s a high school buddy who for years has avoided driving near big urban areas. He just won’t go. Or someone else has to drive him. The pressure stresses him out too much. With each passing year, I feel myself becoming him. Fight it. Don’t let the old man in, as the saying goes.

​We are in the season of propaganda. Lies, distortions, manipulation, half-truths, huge adjectives attempting to get you to hate somebody or something. It’s all over the television airwaves and endemic to social media. You can only escape by turning it all off.
 
Even if you take that track, it is still hard to ignore. Flyers are sent to your mailbox attacking someone running for office. You read it and wonder.
 
One of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century, Jacques Ellul, wrote the book, “Propaganda” in 1973. As part of my communications/journalism college background, the book was required reading in one of my classes. We read, discussed and analyzed the book as part of the course to understand how opinions are formed.
 
At the time Ellul wrote the book, public opinion was studied more from the perspective of “mass communication.” Today, that has become targeted disinformation. But, the concept Ellul put forth still applied -- that tools are used to make you think a certain way and push you in a particular direction so you believe what the propagandist wants you to believe.
 
Our current political climate, driven massively by advertising and social media, allows everyone to say anything they want. Ads aren’t fact-checked. Social media isn’t tethered to reality or the truth. People say and do whatever they want, no-holds-barred. And the targeted publics get bombarded repeatedly.

As discussed by Ellul (and other experts on the subject,) say something often enough, and with a sense of urgency, and people start to wear down. They stop questioning. Their defenses drop. They begin to believe.
 
Ellul sees propaganda as a direct threat to democracy. If you don’t have accurate information, how does the individual make an informed decision?
 
And when a significant portion of the population gets its information through sources espousing a position using distorted or misleading data, the decisions they make in the voting booth aren’t connected to reality. People go opinion-shopping. They align with their preconceived notions of the world.
 
I feel extremely fortunate that while in college, I took two courses (the aforementioned and an editorial writing class), where the professor mandated we read magazines from all political persuasions, and write editorials contrary to our personal beliefs. He forced us to take the position of our enemies (a political or public issue where we didn’t believe the narrative). We had to research the other side, then defend it.
 
This, along with the course on how opinions are formed, was quite enlightening. Everything is pretty much defendable. Anyone who has been in a debate club realizes this. It’s how you choose to defend your position that determines whether others follow and agree with you.
 
That’s where we are today in the U.S. Who do you believe? What do you believe? What are their sources? Where did they get their information?
 
We all need to dig deep. As citizens, we need to challenge ourselves.
 
Last week, I went to see our U.S. Senate candidate and watched as he chose figures to support his narrative, figures that as a person in the audience I couldn’t counteract. Some of his facts sounded phony or highly inaccurate or disturbingly misleading. I would have needed to take notes on everything he said, then go out and research those statements afterwards to determine their veracity – something beyond the scope of most voters.
 
I wish I had better advice to offer. Each of us needs to think about where we’re getting our information, what the sources are, and how it is presented to us. Ads and social media are useless. Discard them. Do your best to follow the facts.

​There are many times the whole concept of being able to influence others to a large extent seems overblown. “You can get 200,000 followers on LinkedIn, if you just follow these three simple steps.” Things like that.
 
You don’t have that power. Most people don’t have that type of reach to make a significant impact.
 
On a lower level though, one person does make a difference. That’s where things happen. It’s how you find out if someone stands out to others, whether a specific individual has a meaningful following.

An example of this came up two weeks ago. I was waiting to get into our fitness center when a woman came up to me, addressed me by name (I’ve never seen her before), and asked how I was doing.
 
Turns out she heads a fitness class that my wife takes, and she is the wife of a friend of mine I recruited to run a Ragnar race last year.  We had never been introduced, though my friend had spoken to his wife about me, and my wife had spoken to her about me as well. So, she knew me tangentially, and I knew her through their observations.
 
She teaches multiple fitness classes. The classes are typically full. She has a signup list that fills up quickly, and ends up having backup people signing the sheet in case someone drops out. The subs fill the slots of those unable to make the session.
 
My wife has described multiple times how she has to remember a week in advance to sign up or the class will be full. Conversely, if her teacher (we will call her C) is going to be gone and they have someone else run her class, the session does not fill up quickly, if at all. The diehards still go, but it is C’s “power of one” that keeps the majority of her class motivated and excited to attend.
 
Soon after meeting C, my wife mentioned she had a substitute for one of her classes, and the number of people registering/showing up declined dramatically. C’s “power of one,” her personality, focus, effort, sense of joy engaged the classmates so intensely that when she had to take some time off, these people didn’t feel the same desire to take the class.
 
It’s a powerful lesson in teaching us that you can make a difference. That what you do impacts others in a positive way (this, of course, can work in reverse, and a jerk teacher can have a small following and when a sub takes over, suddenly the class is full).
 
The takeaway from all this to me is to remember you make a difference. Your effort and how you reach out to others is noticed. When you have that extra special touch, people notice. They want to be around you. You make their day and their world better. C has this in her personality.

The day after she came up to me, I spoke with my wife afterwards and mentioned how I’d instantaneously liked C. She showed an interest, asked questions, listened to what I had to say. Simple things, but they are courtesies many of us have forgotten in our busy world.

There’s that cliché phrase that goes something along the lines of “people won’t care until you show them how much you care about them.” It applies.