You Don't Have To Match The Season

The light is back. The world looks like it's lifted. And somewhere inside, you've been waiting for that shift to reach you, waiting to feel like yourself again. It hasn't come yet. This talk is for that quiet, painful gap between where the season is and where you actually are, between who you thought you'd be by now and who you find yourself still being. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not failing at recovery, at grief, at life. The ground is still thawing. And deep thawing takes time that no calendar can schedule. You don't have to match the season.

Transcript

There's a particular kind of pain that comes in spring. Not the pain of winter. That one, At least, Makes sense. Winter is supposed to be hard. The cold, The dark, The drawing inward. We expect that. We give ourselves permission for it. To be inside our homes and perhaps not doing very much. But spring? Spring is supposed to fix things. As the light comes back, The world turns green again. People around you seem to lift. You can see it on their faces. You can hear it in how they talk. And somewhere inside you, You've been waiting. Waiting for the shift. Waiting for the morning you wake up and something feels different. Lighter. Easier. More like yourself again. And it hasn't come. So now you have two things to carry instead of one. The heaviness you were already holding. And the quiet shame of still holding it when the season says you shouldn't be. If that's where you are right now, I want you to hear this. You are not broken. The ground is still thawing. I want to talk to you today about what happens when the calendar moves forward but we don't. At least not on schedule. About why spring doesn't always reach us when it's supposed to. And about why that isn't failure. And it isn't weakness. It isn't a sign that something has gone permanently wrong with you. It's just the truth of how deep healing actually works. Here's something I've learned, Not from a book, But from living through winters that lasted longer than they should have. The earth doesn't heal from the outside in. When the ground thaws in spring, It doesn't start at the surface. The warmth has to work its way down. And the deeper the frost went, The harder the winter, The longer the cold, The more time it takes for that warmth to reach the places where things grow. You can have birdsong and daffodils and bright sunny afternoons, And the ground six inches down is still frozen solid. This is not a failure of spring, This is just how deep cold works. And you are not so different from that ground. Some of us have had long winters, Not just this season but years of them. Loss that went bone deep, Grief that rewired something. Exhaustion that wasn't just tiredness but a kind of hollowing, The kind of cold that doesn't come from weather but from life. And when something like that freezes you from the inside, It doesn't thaw on a calendar schedule, It thaws slowly from the inside out, In its own time and in its own order. Just because the world outside looks like spring doesn't mean your inside world is required to match it. You are allowed to still be thawing. I think one of the cruelest tricks the mind plays on us during recovery, From grief, From burnout, From depression, From any of the hard passages, Is the comparing mind. It looks around and says, Other people seem fine, Other people are planning things, Enjoying things, Other people have moved on, Why haven't you? And it's such a relentless voice, Isn't it? It sounds so reasonable, So logical. Surely if healing were happening you would feel it by now, Surely at some point the sadness should just stop. But healing is not a straight line and it is rarely visible from the inside. Most of the time when something deep is healing in you, You don't feel it happening, You only notice it later, Months later, Sometimes years later, When you look back and realize you've come further than you thought, That you're carrying something differently now, That a thing that used to floor you barely touches the surface anymore. Healing happens in the dark, Like roots, Like seeds, Like the slow unfreezing of ground that no one can see from the surface. So what do you do with this? What does it mean in practice to be someone who is still thawing while the world around you has moved into spring? I think it means a few things. Firstly, It means you stop measuring yourself against the season. The calendar is not your timetable. Other people's apparent lightness is not evidence of your failure. Spring is a backdrop, Not a deadline. Second, It means you get curious instead of critical. Instead of asking why aren't I better yet, A question that assumes you should be, You ask something softer. What is still asking to be felt? What hasn't been given space yet? What part of me is still waiting to be thawed? Those are very different questions, And they tend to open doors rather than close them. Third, And this might be the most important thing, It means you stop trying to perform recovery. I know how that goes. You know the symptoms are supposed to ease, You know you're meant to be getting better, So you push. You try to feel what you think you should be feeling. You perform the gestures of someone who has healed, The positivity, The forward-looking, The gratitude, While underneath, The frost is still there, And that performance is exhausting. It uses up the very energy you need for actual healing. You are allowed to put it down. You are allowed to say, I am still thawing, And that is enough for today. There's a line I keep coming back to from an old poem, One about a journey that takes longer than expected, Through seas you didn't plan for, Toward a shore that sometimes feels like it's moved further away. The poem is called Ithaca, And its central wisdom is this. The journey itself is not the obstacle. The journey is the point. Every morning you wake up, Still carrying it, And you carry it anyway. Every day you keep going, When you thought you would feel better by now. That is not stalling. That is the work. That is the journey. The shore exists. You will reach it. But you don't need to be there yet to be making progress. So if you came here today because the season changed and you didn't, I want to leave you with this. You have not missed spring. You have not been left behind. You are not broken, And you are not failing at the task of being human. You are someone whose winter went deep, And the thawing is happening, Slowly, Below the surface, In the places you can't yet see. Trust the process you cannot observe. Rest in the waiting, And be patient with the ground. Spring doesn't demand that you rush, And neither do I. If you'd like to sit with what came up for you today, I've created a companion meditation to this talk. Just a few minutes to help you settle into that patience, That permission to still be in the thaw. To find it, Take a look at my meditations, And look for the meditation called Still Thawing, A companion meditation. I hope you find it useful. Take care of yourselves, And allow yourself to continue thawing.