Seasons

You know…

Dear reader.

I used to read these long analyses in university, on seasons shouting over vast distances about change. Ideas that bring grief and love, happiness and warmth, and I think. I think, I kind of get it now.

I get the need to equate emotions and change with something physical, something constant. I get the need to be able to ponder change as a known constant. Something we find ourselves at a loss to describe, but also something that is easy to compare.

I mean, its easy to understand isn’t it?

I could laugh with you about the warm summer times in your life. A time of a happiness that lasts, of memories that fade gently, drifting along the softer parts of our nostalgic consciousness.

I could sit with you as you begrudgingly moan to me, dear reader, of the winters of life. The sadness and loneliness we feel, how life isn’t fair. That constant need for companionship with those, ‘Ugh, I wish they would just call me already,’ kind of moments.

I could listen to you talk softly on the autumns of life, times of healing, of patience. Where one never quite knows how long something will stay with us, for better or for worse.

I could smile through your recollections of spring, dear reader. The energy of change, excitement and challenges, spring is youth, a time of choice.

But,

Why is it that when I’m asked what changes have happened to me, I come up short?

When someone questions my growth? My maturity, or my ability to make choices? That I can’t find the answers?

I can name a hundred references to the changes of life, intricately spoken through pages and pages in the seasons of lives truly lived.

But to name myself, to name the problems I face, the difficulties and joys I find in my life… I’m at a loss.

I guess I love the idea of seasons, dear reader. A quantifiable existence of comparison. An annul of vicariously wonderful experiences to lend, all for ourselves.

But I think I get it dear, reader.

I get that change is not found among the pages of love and loss.

Change is found in the quiet places we find ourselves thinking in from time to time. It’s in the smiles we have when no one is around. It’s in the gentle sadness we feel when there’s no one to talk to. Its in the patience we learn from ourselves when we make the same mistakes over and over again. Change is in that uncomfortable feeling we get when we challenge ourselves to do things we know we hate, but need to face for ourselves anyway.

I get it,

Dear, Reader.

Change is in the seasons we face every day of our lives.

Because we need seasons.

We need them to learn, to mature and to understand ourselves.

We need the them not to live for, but to know that someone else knew how we felt.

We need seasons,  even if we perhaps don’t know it ourselves.

We need seasons, because time is fleeting and seasons are a time of change, a time of life and death,

A time for growth.