Spring Sprung Again

Once spring is over there is always a mess to clear up. It feels like a brutal burglary compared to the sneaky nature of the other seasons – slowly replacing your possessions until you notice everything around you has changed. Despite knowing this is an annual occurrence, I always react as the name spring dictates, with absolute surprise.

The aggression of spring is rarely appreciated in the moment. Life grabs you by the shoulders, grips hard and shakes. Much like I imagine someone feels when experiencing an earthquake whilst knowingly living on a fault line, the whole experience is shocking and overwhelming but also so routine. Each year I’m hit a little harder, and each year, as I crawl out from under the rubble that’s left of my quaked life, I wonder not just how the hell I survived again; but why?

Distracted by the chaos and destruction, I’d spend the rest of the year disoriented and dizzy. Months of my life pass as I quietly lie down, close my eyes and try to recover from the vertigo of change, realisation and loss.

This year has felt much of the same. Before the heat of spring in London began to climb up into my tiny top floor flat and rest there till September, my recovery began. With both feet firmly on the floor I felt a giggle begin to rise in my throat. Life was beginning to feel a bit better now. I fidgeted and waited for the spring sun to soak me in gold.

Still, as the heat grew, the room around me disintegrated. With more heartbreak and death, the floor below me shook. Left with nothing but shaky ground I wondered for the hundredth time if the ground had ever really stopped shaking? Too scared to place my feet on it, I’d forgotten the fundamental truth of my living conditions. Was I the only girl in the world in shaky circumstances? I contemplated my victimhood to console myself.

“Why” is such a comfortable place to exist. Perpetually in search of answers that will resolve all your problems, inevitably never finding any of them good enough. As I deeply meditate on the actions of others, reality is warped by fantasy that I can control. Now in my twenty-fifth spring, so confused by the actions of others, I found even less answers, questioning so much that I never wanted to ask a question again. Finally, I realised that I’d never find an answer. It was pointless to go looking for one.

Every question obscured the essential truth. I shouldn’t have been asking why I survived when I didn’t. I never have. I now hope I never will. Survival means there’s no threat of impermanence and no liberation in the unknown. To survive your circumstances, to never experience drastic changes or face risk is the true death.

To live is to be willing to die over and over again.¹

Spring reminds us what it is to be born of this world. Flowers bloom, lambs bleat and people congregate. In the light, new life forms take over in place of the old. Birth is painful, messy and often dangerous. We are faced with the inevitable truth of our end at the beginning. But amongst the difficult emotions and experiences is boundless potential for joy, often manifesting in the most confronting and unexpected times. A joy, that we would, and do, die time and time again for.

I love the chaos of spring. Life balanced on the knife’s edge. We quiver between opposite nodes as everything overlaps in a way it’s not supposed to. Carelessly superimposed but beautifully hung on the wall. Lately I’ve decided that my feelings don’t matter as much as the creation of these altered worlds with the new life we find inside of them. But of course, it still means saying goodbye to what we knew and felt was important before. The phrase continues to rattle around in my brain:

To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Pema Chödrön’s Buddhist teachings in When Things Fall Apart call us to accept the impermanence of life. To stop trying to control the resulting picture. It’s a lesson I’ve accepted but struggled to implement over my adult life. As I’ve clung desperately, what appeared to be solid has turned liquid, escaping my grasp. It’s feels easy to accept now that things are fluid, in the way it’s easy to accept you’re skydiving when you’re already in freefall halfway between the plane and the ground. I worry that no matter how many books on Buddhism I read, I’ll have to keep learning this lesson the hard way. I’m scared I’ll be in pain again, even though I know it’s an inevitable part of life.

However, spring reminds us that we can celebrate our suffering. We are reminded to live in the fullest sense of the word. To experience the worst and best of being human. If there’s pain in birth, there should be pleasure in death.²

Beauty is found nestled in the tender heart of paradox. Fundamental and ineffable. Joy in grief. The stability of never finding solid ground. Accepting the work and working on acceptance. Dying to live. A beautiful life is not the same as a happy life because contentment is a place that lacks conflict. Paradoxically, I’m happy to be enduring a beautiful life.

While appreciating each small pocket of joy and contentment, I’m trying not to be an emotional perfectionist. To stop monitoring, pathologizing and denying my negative emotions. I’m frightened by my past self’s inability to realise that a bad day or even month, does not equate to a bad life.

As the future approaches with new shining promises of enduring happiness, I know the hot cold months of March to May will re-ground me each year as my emotional acuity fades and I let myself spend more time living in dreams than reality. I’m hopeful that each year I’ll see life’s beauty with a little more clarity and keep sight of it for a little longer, as my short sightedness adjusts to the distance of my life.

1. Chödrön, Pema. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala, 2002.

2. Ibid.