We’re all familiar with the idea of seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall1, and Winter. The seasons cycle around and repeat every year. Now, life doesn’t repeat every year, but it does mimic the cycle of birth, life, decline and end. Also, unlike the normal kind of calendar seasons we’re used to, the circumstances around each season of life are different.
Let me explain.
In life, you generally only get to do a season once. They’re kind of like a stage of life. So, middle school would be a season, so would college, or being engaged and preparing for your wedding, or a two-year stint at a job, or six-months recovering from a car accident.
A change of season will most likely require a change in your habits, routines, and rhythms. If you have a routine like waking up at 5am and going for a run2, that’s going to be awfully hard to maintain when you’re working the opening shift at Starbucks.
Self imposed seasons can be really helpful if you’re trying to accomplish something specific, like three months of really late nights to start a business or finish a project. There’s an end date – a light at the end of the tunnel – so you can work really hard knowing you’ll be able to rest at the end of the push.3 When you enter one of these short term seasons, your routines can flex and spring back into place when you’re done.
Other seasons are mid-term, like getting a Master’s degree. It’s going to be a couple of years of focus, but the rest of life isn’t going to stop to accommodate things. You’ll need to develop the habits of reading, writing, and studying as part of your other routines. What’s great about this is when the season ends the new habits are really ingrained and you can redirect these habits to support a different goal. Or you can completely reset everything and reimagine how you want your daily, weekly and annual life to look.
And sometimes a seasons is a long term commitment, like marriage. The change is permanent and your life will never be the same. There’s another person involved who you deeply care about and your habits and routines will naturally shift towards nurturing that relationship, and the habits and routines that get in the way get jettisoned.
Seasons can be really great or really hard. When you find yourself in a really hard season, the temptation will be to try to go back to a really great season. It’s not gonna work. You’ll end up living in the past and miss all the good that is happening in the hard season.4 And the beauty of a hard season is that when it ends (and all seasons come to an end), you appreciate the good seasons that much more.
I remember this story about how all the really great songs are great because they have a sucky bridge or verse or something. You have to go through the sucky part to get to the great chorus where you can sing along. If the bridge didn’t suck so much, the chorus wouldn’t be nearly as great. And if the chorus wasn’t so great, the bridge wouldn’t seem liked it sucked.
Anyhow, take some time to consider what season you’re in and how you can completely embrace it, or if that season is coming to a close, how you can prepare for the next one.
Photo by Artem Kulikov on Unsplash