What Spring Teaches

I used to hate spring. I genuinely hated this season that seemed boring and long in my ever busy body that impatiently wanted summer. April and May drug on like Sunday church service for a little kid in a wooden pew. Spring felt like a tease, it felt like a pointless pause. Like a unknown opening act at a concert; I just wanted the band I came here for to come out already. Summer was the real show stopper: fully bloomed trees, daylight and warmth that hang on through the evening, a welcoming space for barbecues and drinks and laughter and play.

But something shifted when I began journaling. When I picked up this hobby that forces your body and mind to slow down - to recognize bits and pieces and moments that normally aren't noticed with our fast naked eyes - I felt like a new soul with new eyes and a new perspective. I remember one late day in March as I wrote in my spiral notebook about the unusually warm sun that day and the birds and the budding trees. My eyes were finally opened. They were opened to the beauty of waiting, the beauty of small growth, the beauty of slowness, and the beauty of noticing these things. The things that we can only see when our bodies are slow, when our eyes are wide.

If there were no moments of anticipation in life and our bodies received what our minds craved the moment we wished for them, half of our joy would be taken away without this process of waiting. There is a steady and building joy in anticipation that can make what we're waiting for so much sweeter. Because the quicker something is here, the quicker it's gone. And when we realize that the moments of waiting are where the good work is forged, our perspective shifts to those moments that seem like a pointless pause.

The small steps of growth become the moments we will later look back on with a great appreciation.

The trees can't fully bloom into a breathtaking explosion of green without those first little buds lost among the brown branches.

It would feel jilting if the air crashed suddenly into July hot from the February cold, without the slow fading of crispy April mornings to warm-ish afternoons of May.

The aching in my body to roll down my car windows and let the sunlight in is a good ache that only makes those moments in summer - with the music blasting and friends in the passenger seat - so sublime. I love that ache, and I love the tease of the Spring sun, leaving us wanting more. It seems less like torture, more like teaching.

The slow settling into warmer and longer days, greener and sweeter air, are moments that remind us to walk slowly with eyes wide. To recognize the small things that make the big things possible. To sit in the quiet. To listen to the birds. To sit outside or open a window when it's just warm enough. To walk steadily, arms outstretched through the shallow end, feeling the water creep up every inch of your goosebumped skin. To examine those moments that feel like a boring torture, and ask ourselves why. Because there is normally a bird chirping, a flower blooming, a sun rising, a lesson brewing in plain sight. We just have to slow down, with eyes wide.