Spring Geek out

Pardon me for the cliche topic, but I think I’m finally starting to understand why people talk about the weather so much. When you live in a place like New England, where you get four seasons a year, the change in seasons never gets old. You can’t help but get all Charlie Brown and obsess over how the old season changed you and what you hope you’ll get out of the new season.

We all have seasons in our lives that mirror the meteorological ones. Or maybe not, if you love winter and instead of sitting at home playing John Mayer’s Sob Rock on your stereo eighty times in a row, you get a kick out of throwing snowballs or trudging through the snow.

Right now, I’m in full spring geek-out mode, counting down the minutes until we get to put our winter coats away and gallop into the fresh New England air with nothing more than a light sweater or track jacket.

The emergence of spring never gets old for me. It’s my favorite season and each year, I look forward to all the untouched, new life ahead, both personally and in nature. The flowers that emerge always look their best and it makes me want to start taking better care of house plants, which always die on me due to my negligence.

When you really think about it, everything is really the same but because you had a different season before it, it seems new and different. Although I’m not a fan of winter, I could never live in a warm climate like Florida or, I hate to say it, my native Puerto Rico. The monotony of warmth all year round would drive me insane and I wouldn’t want something that brings me such joy each year to become mundane and routine.

There is already plenty of routine predictability in my life.

New seasons give you something to look forward to; the freedom of warmth and consistent sunshine could never be savored properly unless you’ve been sheltered inside from the cold, rattling winds of wintertime. I think that’s why it’s important to have both good and bad seasons in your life.

If everything was all good all the time, then you’d resent it and feel almost lifeless. Life is best lived when you encounter good and bad; you appreciate the good so much more after you go through a tough time. And when you are going through a tough time, you gain new respect for yourself and the strength you’ve developed.

Sometimes I think that tough times would be a lot easier to deal with if they matched the weather outside. If life throws bricks at you during the winter or late fall, at least you won’t be bombarded with sunlight burning your eyes and people all around you in good moods and whistling while they work, so to speak.

It gives you an excuse to be tucked away from the world when shit in your life goes down during bad weather and it feels almost good to lean into the misery a bit, especially when you know that with time, the internal and external forecast will get better eventually. Then again, I’ve had some winters when all was fine and dandy and I actually longed for a storm to watch from my window.

Being alive is marvelous, in every season, and I finally appreciate the concept of change.

On the other hand, why change good weather or good times in your life when you have it? Often times we don’t really long to have a bad climate after being in a good one for a long time, right?

So what can you do when it has to end or you have to leave it? For me, the short answer is to buckle up and brace yourself for the upcoming, sometimes inevitable storm – to see it as a new adventure that will keep life interesting and give you fodder for great stories to tell your grandchildren. I think it’s far more interesting to talk about the blizzard that kept you trapped on I95 for 24 hours than that time you sat in Aruba getting a suntan.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not excited about spring this year, hence my geek out. Thanks for listening!