Today’s accompanying tune: “The Waiting” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Restlessness has settled over the household in the way it often does this time of year. With spring comes longer days, warmer nights, fewer crowds. The migratory birds return on their way north from their winter homes, stopping over in the desert and bringing their soundtracks with them. The flowers nudge closer to the sun, eager to break free of the cacti or shrubbery in which they’re encased. The breeze still has an edge to it, a crisp sensibility that cuts through the sun’s growing warmth. The leaves bud, waiting to explode into being following the ideal set of days, the sun just so, the warmth not yet harsh. It is spring, and for all its abundance and life, it is a season that requires the utmost patience, the days of waiting, waiting, waiting for everything to fall into place.
Patience is a practice, one rooted in the trust that comes with time. Trust that this way of being, these conditions and these days, will eventually give way to others, ones more suited to the endeavors we really want to do. The ones we don’t have to trick ourselves into doing or talk ourselves into. The ones that breath life into being and make the mundane spectacular. For me, those activities are in the mountains. And so, spring is the season of patience.
Spring is referred to as shoulder season once you start gaining altitude, evoking the roundedness that connects two otherwise level, predictable fields. Winter is the time for skiing, for long slogs followed by swift ends. The short days are painted blue, the world muted under a thick coat of snow and ice. Summer, then, is the vibrant explosion, full of greens and blues and browns, dotted by energetic flowers and teeming with life. There’s an eagerness to summer, the first warm day a countdown to the return of frigid winter. Make hay while the sun shines, and shines, and shines. Between the two sits spring, marked only by its transitory nature. Depending on how the winter shook out, spring may or may not be muddy, messy, cold, melting. It could be warm, generating unease at the prospect of a robust wildfire season to follow. It could be early; it could be fashionably late. The slope of its lines drastic, sharp, steep, or simply sloped, its grade hardly perceptible until, all at once, it is summer. Its first signs of life are welcomed, gladly, after the doldrums of winter. But eventually the novelty wears off, the pollen count ticks higher, and the snow refuses to melt. Summer whispers in the breeze, dragging a string on the floor for us to chase, only to be snatched away at the last minute. “I’m just around the corner,” it taunts. And still, I fall for it time and time again.
I daydream about the alpine lakes that haven’t yet thawed, the trails that are still buried under feet of snow. I rummage through camping equipment, eagerly cleaning tools I know look better with a fine layer of grime. I browse trail reports from this time last year, hoping that a freak melt event lines up with an early season trip. I scour campsites, enter lotteries, research permits. I park myself outside, eager to don my summer skin, the one best acclimated to warmer temperatures and a dusting of dirt. Soon, I tell myself. Soon, we will be in the backcountry. Soon, I will be sleeping outside, rising early with the sun and the birds. Soon, I will be breathing heavily in thinner air. The wait is nearly unbearable.
Growing up, I was reliably chastised for my lack of patience. I was told I was selfish, difficult, wanted too much. I just needed to wait, to be. And though I understand now the importance of waiting, of the empty days on the calendar, the discomfort that comes from existing in an empty space, it took understanding that, no, this is not how I will feel forever to get there. My early impatience was rooted in fear, in doubt, in scarcity. What if I missed something, something important? What if the right time never came? What if I was stuck, here, waiting for something that never came, would never be? What if this was all there was, all there would be? What kind of life was that?
Even now, I fight the impatience, an overeager flower trying to break out of its case too soon. It is always there, lurking, whispering sour nothings into my ear. “This isn’t your season.” “The snow won’t melt and this year will be a wash, too.” “There’s never enough time, you won’t do nearly all the things you want to do, see everything you want to see.” The urge to plan trips, book permits, set goals rears its head, threatening to destabilize the peace of patience with the buzz of restlessness. So much stillness only generates more energy — it has to go somewhere. In previous seasons, the energy, the restless, winds its way through my neurons and lands in the anxiety center of my brain, all that potential converted into thoughts and fears that serve only their own purposes. Anticipation, nervousness, both synonyms for anxiety. The build up before the drop. The sleepless night before the summit. The inability to bear the waiting, the stillness, the emptiness, so strong as to pull me off the cliff and into the open air. The electric current coursing through my body an ever-present reminder that I wasn’t doing. Time, a finite resource. A ticking clock, counting down the minutes until winter. Prepare for the worst, but never expect the best.
Time, though, that curious thing called time. It has a way of forcing itself on you in precisely the way you need it. In time, I learned trust. Days would go on. Summer always followed spring. Fall always followed summer. What felt permanent, unmovable, unbearable, eventually eased. Discomfort, however long it endured, ultimately passed, sweetening whatever lie on the other side. Years spent anxious, fearful, limited, had yielded to something new, something universes away yet rooted in place, in me. At risk of falling into yet another cliché, discomfort became comfortable, and those spaces no longer contained emptiness that rapidly filled with anxiety. They were full in their own right, full of potential, full of the promise of growth. In its reliability, time taught trust. Presented with enough evidence, enough proof, I could lean into it. I could practice patience, even if I felt unable to perform it.
And so, this season, I greet the restlessness like a well-traveled friend. She wants to move, to do, to work under the sun with the heat to her back. She needs open space for boundless energy, for the potential only she can see. I listen to her stories, vividly imagining the steps it took to get to such a place, a place without limitations other than her own imagination. Her souvenirs aren’t trinkets but postcards sent from the far reaches of her mind, places we haven’t yet seen. I don’t worry I won’t make it, that she will stay and take up residence in the spare rooms of my mind. Always, she departs, leaving only optimism and opportunity in her wake.
Soon, I say. Soon, we will be there.
- Megan