By Aaron Zint
Extremes
When you live in a city with extreme weather (think walking out your door to heat that feels like you’re crawling into an oven, 21 days of rain in a row or snow that shuts down schools and local businesses), you tend to celebrate the changing of the seasons more than most. But the weather isn’t the only type of season we tend to celebrate when it changes. There are seasons of life that can feel like climbing into an oven or like the sun will never shine again. The pandemic felt like one very long season in that way.
What Seasons Offer
When it’s the change itself that we are ever-looking forward to, we can tend to miss the gift of what our current season has to offer. Yes, summers in Redding, California can feel like the surface of the sun. But with that experience also affords the most breathtakingly refreshing swims in Whiskeytown Lake, pool-side popsicles and mid-week hangouts late into the night because the kids don’t have school the next day. Yes, the rainy seasons can be dreary, but you also get a chance to cozy up around a fire, a reason to watch a movie in the middle of day and the incredible green hills on the 505.
Today is a Gift
The challenge for us, when we are in the middle of what feels like a long and difficult season, is to ask the question, “What is available to me in this season that isn’t in others?” Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called ‘the present’.” There is nothing wrong with looking forward to the changing of the seasons. There is hope to be found in the changing of the seasons. Just don’t miss the gift that is waiting for you in the middle of the season you’re currently in.