The Opportunity of the Spring

First published on January 15, 2021

From where I sit, I see the tops of many trees across the London cityscape, empty of leaves in the crisp winter air. On one tree, sheltered by school buildings, a few golden autumn leaves still hang. Another, an evergreen, stands proud and dark against the winter chill.

And beside me, in a balcony planter, sheltered by the balcony and a drainpipe, shoots are growing.

As the last year has progressed, I have felt myself more and more shutting down. My work slowing, my energy lower. It was late last year, when talking to my brother, that my struggle around that shifted for me. 'More or less every other mammal,' he reminded me, 'is getting ready to hibernate right now.' We humans, we pretend that the seasons don't matter, and - at least for me - the aliveness of the city in the winter helps with that. But not this year. The city is dead this year, hibernating along with so many parts of our culture in the face of the winter of coronavirus. But without those distractions, without all the myriad parts of society that take our attention, give us energy or drain us, without them, perhaps we will see the seasons more clearly.

And what if we do? What if winter is the time to hunker down, to create a nest, to finish things. To allow the old to die off, even those last few sheltered leaves, golden but not fallen. And what if we sit in the biggest of winters as a society, with so much old closed, shut down, turning golden despite our governments' best efforts.

Our societies will not look the same in the spring.

I was speaking to Robert Holden, the psychologist, coach and author, last year. He said that once, when he went to speak with his agent, full of new ideas for his next work, she stopped him and said, 'Robert, are you expecting a child?' He was, and she knew he was because she had seen this kind of creativity before from authors around the birth of their children. When people feel the energy of birth, you see, the energy of birth lives through them.

Soon, as the months pass, spring will arrive in the Northern hemisphere. The shoots on my balcony will become daffodils and other plants. God willing, our societies will reopen, as more and more of us are vaccinated against the virus. Perhaps, this reopening just as the energy of birth and growth envelops our countries will allow the birth and creation of the new. As I wrote before, things break and are destroyed in the dark times, but things are made, too. Without the winter, there can be no spring.

And so, as the world opening again becomes more a reality, we need to ask ourselves: what will we grow? What will we create? What will we give birth to?

How will we make sure that the new leaves that grow are not simply the same as the ones that have died off, but are more alive, more colourful, more joyful?

How will each of us contribute to the reopening of a society that is not the same as before, but better?

That is the opportunity of the spring.