Seasons

Summer is here. In Charlotte, you don’t need anyone to tell you that. It’s 92 degrees as I write this. Numbers shouldn’t have to go that high, but here they stand. North Carolina is lovely most of the year, just not right now.

We spend almost no time thinking about seasons, and almost all of our time living around them. We choose our clothes according to the weather, plan activities based on where the Earth stands in the cosmos, and hope time will be kind to our hair and our crops.

I’m not just talking about the big four. Our lives are governed by seasons within seasons. Each day, we feel the rising and falling sun, the ebb and flow of tides. If you’re lucky, your body orients itself to these cycles with a circadian rhythm. If you’re like me, you’ve popped melatonin for years to shadow everyone else.

Even those fractals aren’t enough. We’ve given ourselves imaginary seasons too. Weekends granted to us by the Man, months designed by a drunk apparently, and leap years because nobody’s perfect.

Some windows open and close on their own time: market cycles, TV shows, Taylor Swift eras, Mercury will be in retrograde next week. It sounds like I’ve gone crazy writing this, but I promise I’m telling you something. To everything, there is a season, and everything is a season.

They add up directionally over a lifetime and weather us. Puddles become oceans, droughts become deserts. Or perhaps not. Accepted gracefully, you and your leather develop a nice patina. The hard part is when you find yourself out of sync.

That’s the trick with seasons. They tend to get away from us. Each one brings pain for anyone caught offside by it, and it’s not always so easy to catch up.

Early on, I considered timing my newsletter to coincide with the solstices and equinoxes, but I realized that was too infrequent to matter and what’s more, I’ll never have my act together that well.

I’m making progress, though. I started shaving my head the other day because time wasn’t kind to my hair and my crops. It felt right, it felt good. Like getting ahead of change for once. Charles Barkley calls it coming home.

When you’re caught between seasons, it can feel like the universe is punishing you, and you can’t exactly snap your fingers and change your circumstances. Some say it’s always the darkest before the dawn, but no one tells you how dark it has to get first. Only you know what you’re going through.

And only you can keep going. That raindance might not work out, but it helps to remember it’s only a season. Whatever this is, it too shall pass.

A few things have helped me: my loving wife, my charismatic son, sobriety, and the dogged to the point of being unreasonable refusal to give up. There are many seasons in life. Giving up isn’t one of them.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the Tao Te Ching, and as the kids would say, it hits different. I find it to be an elegant antidote to the decadence we’re living in and a welcome reminder of why seasons aren’t merely something to get through—we need them to grow. No one gets humbled by choice.

The ten thousand things arise together;
in their arising is their return
Now they flower
and flowering,
sink homeward,
returning to the root.

Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin rendition)

Look around and you’ll see many things going back to where they belong. We all get there eventually. Sometimes, the most logical thing you can do is let go and trust the universe. There’s some intuition behind it.

So, get out there and have a summer to remember, even if it means forgetting yourself sometimes. Revel in all the joy the season brings. The days are long so make the most of them. Remember you happen to be tilted toward the Sun at the moment, and always be ready for the fall.

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