Everything has its season
“Embrace the seasons and cycles of your life. There is magic in change.”
There's a beautiful cherry tree that I see every time I go to get my nails done. For just one or two weeks each year, it’s laden with marshmallowy clouds of beautiful cherry blossoms. They’re honestly the biggest, most billowing blossoms I've ever seen on a cherry tree. It's absolutely stunning, even though it really doesn't look like much for the rest of the year, when you could walk past it and not even notice it was there. Then, once a year for a few short weeks, it comes into its own.
The annual cycle of this tree helped me realise that, as humans, we often forget about - or simply ignore - seasonality. Instead, we act as if we ought to be at our best all year round, never changing from month to month, week to week or even during the course of a day. In reality, that's not only impossible, but it's also not the way things are meant to be.
Just like the cherry tree and everything else in nature, we all have seasons when we are absolutely at our best. Sometimes those seasons are long, at other times they might be short or even over before we know it! We can’t always be delivering results or achieving big things which are visible to everyone around us.
It’s important to have seasons when we’re dormant, or when we’re putting the hard work into growth, without (seemingly) much to show for it on the outside. Sometimes, we need seasons when we’re more focused on planning and getting ready for things than achieving short-term and visible goals.
It helps to think about this in an agricultural way, because it’s exactly how farming works. There’s a planning season which involves preparing the ground; a planting season; a season in which we wait for the crops to grow; and finally, a season for the harvest. I think we could all benefit from thinking more about what seasonality means in our own lives, not just on a monthly or yearly basis, but in the course of our lifetime.
I’m about to undergo a really big seasonal change in my own life, when my daughter leaves for university later this year. It represents an end to my intense parenting stage - living under the same roof as a single parent - and an evolution into a period of more independence, for both of us.
Just like the seasons, our lives change, and often it happens sooner than we thought it would. It feels like only five minutes ago when I was hurriedly giving my daughter her breakfast, checking the contents of her backpack and bundling her into the car for the school run. But everything is temporary, and somehow, understanding that enables me to have more gratitude for what I have right now; because I know that just like the cherry blossom, nothing lasts forever.
