2024 - The Year of Sun on Bare Skin After a Long, Long Winter.
My whole life I’ve been fascinated by the cyclical nature of the seasons and the vital role they play in the natural world. Take winter, for example, that many people wouldn’t say is their favorite season. It’s hard to enjoy the months in which almost the entire natural world is dead or sleeping; in which every time you step outside, nature seems to want nothing more than to make you go back inside. When I was a kid, I liked winter because of two things: christmas (presents) and snow days (no school). As a young adult I lost a lot of my appreciation for winter, likely because it meant walking across campus between classes in unfathomable cold.
I don’t quite know why, but this year my feelings about winter shifted drastically. Perhaps it’s because my frontal lobe is finally most developed (hello 2os!), but sudddenly I am filled with an appreciation for winter and the absolute necessity it serves in the natural world. The trees and plants rely on winter for their life cycles, as does the rest of the natural world. Without winter, and its necessary harshness, nature could not exist as it is. Quite simply, without winter, there would be no spring, summer, or fall.
I haven’t tried to hide the fact that I have not much enjoyed the season of life in which I’ve been a college student (AKA the last 4 years). Everything about being a college student is antithetical to who I am and what I want in life. In my experience, there was a complete lack of stability, balance, quality of life, and resources to take care of oneself. The past four years have challenged me on the very level of my soul, and there were times that I thought I hit rock bottom, and then only sunk deeper.
And despite the fact that the paragraph above is very much the truth, I stayed. I stayed because I know how privileged I am to even be in a position to obtain a college degree. It is a privilege that many people do not have, and even admitting above that I have not enjoyed it fills me with a noticable degree of guilt.
So there you have it - that is where my head has been for the past four years. Mostly unhappy, guilty because of this, and despite those things, grateful to be where I was. What a conundrum, right? Believe me it was as exhausting as it sounds.
And so, as I enter my very last semester of college, I find myself drawing parallels between this season of life I am getting ready to leave behind, and the winter season.
As I’ve started to take stock of and plan for the year ahead, I’m just now starting to realize how many amazing things it holds. All I have to do is get to May 1st, and the past four years will suddenly make way for what I anticipate will be a beautiful life. And I’m genuinely getting emotional sitting here writing this, because there are few things more beautiful in life than realizing that your hope was not misplaced.
It reminds me of an essay I wrote last semester, I’ll put an excerpt:
“You see, I like many others, find myself struggling come about February. The startling lack of green around me begins to hurt. Like pins and needles in my toes at first, but by the end of winter, it always escalates into a deep full-skeletal throb.
And then… they come to say hello. Bright green fingertips digging themselves out from underground. They burst into balls of yellow, nodding cheerfully until the coming heat of summer exhausts them.
My friends, the daffodils. How could I ever describe the smell? Like a steaming pot of strongly brewed chlorophyll tea, if green was a smell. You smell the first one before you see it. A beacon of spring on an otherwise blustery winter day. It hits your mouth and then your nose a few seconds later, the only sweet I’ve ever smelled that didn’t make my molars ache. You look and look, hoping your nose wasn’t playing a cruel trick. And then you see her. Bobbing all alone, defiant and friendly. “Look!” she says, “You weren’t a fool to hope! I am so proud of you.”
Like, the feeling of sun on bare skin after a long, long winter. Like sustained hope at last.”
That is the feeling I have going into this year. The feeling of sun on bare skin after a long, long winter. The feeling of sustained hope at last. My own personal spring is arriving after four years of winter, and suddenly I am grateful for that winter and the necessary role it has had in bringing my spring.
Cheers to 2024 friends, it’s going to be a good one. <3