The Unreliable Season

Do I need a sweater? Where are my rain boots? Can I make room in my closet for my spring coats? Should I put the shovels away? When will spring actually get here? There is a particular kind of foolishness that overtakes otherwise sensible people in early April. I pack away the heavy coats. I make plans involving outdoor seating. I buy tomato seedlings far too soon, carrying them home like small hostages to optimism, then spend the next fortnight shuttling them in and out of the cold with increasing resentment on both sides.

Spring, it turns out, has never promised us anything.

We are the ones who made that up.

This year, as in most years, the equinox arrived with its customary symbolic weight — that perfect, fleeting balance of light and dark — and we responded with the predictable surge of anticipation. Something in us tilts toward the returning light with an urgency that feels almost embarrassing in its nakedness. We want warmth. We want to be done with it. We want it to begin already.

And then April arrives, and the world does what April always does. It keeps us guessing.

There's a concept in Japanese aesthetics called ma — the pregnant pause, the charged interval between one thing and the next. It is considered not an absence but a presence in its own right, a space alive with potential. The tea master waits before pouring. The musician holds the silence before the note. And the season, if we would only attend to it properly, holds this exact quality in early spring: not emptiness, but a kind of vibrating fullness that hasn't yet declared itself.

We tend to experience this interval as frustrating rather than fertile. Our relationship with seasonal transition has been so thoroughly mediated by thermostats, grow lights, and grocery stores stocked with strawberries in January that we've largely lost the felt sense of what it means to wait with a season rather than simply ahead of it. We want spring to perform on schedule. When it dithers, we take it personally.

But consider what the unreliability is actually teaching us, if we're willing to be taught.

A frost in the third week of April is not a sign the season is failing. It is the season being precisely, honestly itself. Spring in the northern latitudes has always been a negotiation, a back-and-forth between competing forces, neither fully in control. The meteorological record bears this out cheerfully and without apology. April is among the most variable months of the year, capable of spanning an astonishing range of temperatures within a single week: yesterday, 21 degrees; tomorrow, -3. We know this. We have always known this. And yet, every year, the first warm afternoon convinces us that the contract has been signed.

What would it mean, instead, to meet the season's inconsistency with something other than disappointment?

How do we set aside our own agenda long enough to allow the thing itself to be revealed? Most of us, in our relationship with spring, are not attending at all. We are projecting. We are carrying the season we want, draping it hopefully over the season that actually exists, and then feeling vaguely betrayed when the two don't align.

Real attention would require us to meet each April morning with something closer to genuine curiosity. What is actually here today? Not: Is today living up to my expectations? But rather: what is the world actually doing, and can I be present for that specific thing, even if it isn't the thing I wanted?

This is harder than it sounds, because the wanting runs deep. Our longing for spring isn't merely a preference for warmer weather. It is tangled up with some of our most fundamental psychological architecture that the darkness was not permanent, for evidence that the world is still capable of beginning again. The equinox carries that weight. No wonder we press so hard against the weeks that follow, urging them to deliver on the promise we heard in those balanced hours of light and dark.

But perhaps this is precisely why the season's unreliability is worth sitting with rather than resisting. Because learning to hold expectation lightly, learning to want something without clutching it, is not only a seasonal practice. It is one of the more essential arts of being alive. Early spring enacts this lesson with remarkable consistency. We think we know what's coming. We think the trajectory is clear. And then Wednesday brings snow, and we are gently but firmly reminded that we do not run this operation.

What if that were a relief rather than a grievance?

I've been watching some tiger lily fronds push through the decay on my walk these past days, tracking the daily advance with an attention I rarely give to anything. Some mornings, they look further along; some mornings, after a cold night, it seems to have reconsidered. It is not, I've come to understand, doing anything wrong. It is responding, with perfect fidelity, to exactly the conditions it finds itself in. It is not impatient. It is not disappointed. It is simply, entirely present to the actual temperature, the actual light, the actual moment.

There is something to learn from that level of responsiveness. Not passivity — the lilies are doing tremendous work beneath the surface, as all springs are doing, in the dark and cold and wet that we'd rather not think about. But a kind of attunement that doesn't require conditions to be other than they are before the real work can begin.

The real work, it turns out, is always happening now. In the unreliable, inconsistent, perfectly honest season that actually exists, rather than the one we ordered.

Perhaps this is what the equinox was trying to tell us, in its quiet way. Not spring is here, the waiting is over — but rather here is a moment of balance, and balance is always temporary, and that is the nature of living systems, and you might as well make peace with that now.

The coats can stay by the door a little longer. The seedlings can wait. And in that waiting, if we're willing to bring genuine attention rather than impatience, we might find that what April offers is not the spring we expected — but something stranger and more interesting: a season teaching us, in real time, how to be present to what is actually arriving, rather than what we've already decided should be here.

That's not a lesser gift. That might, in fact, be the whole point.

What is the season asking of you right now, before it delivers what you were hoping for?

Expand Your Understanding
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​I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

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​William Wordsworth​

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
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Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
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The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
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For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Please reply to this email to let me know what you think. We are all on a learning path.

-Phronesis- ​

A way of being in the world that shows concern with one’s life, with the lives of others now & in the future and all ways we touch the world.

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