Last week I went for a long walk. I walked up Riverside Drive from 61st all the way up to 110th, then met a friend so we could walk down through Central Park together. Before meeting up with my friend I was listening to Beloved. It’s read by Toni Morrison herself and I loved losing myself in the story as I walked through the city. At one point, Morrison writes, “In Ohio, seasons are theatrical, each one entering like a primadonna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.” This line literally stopped me in my tracks. I paused the book and sat on a bench to write it down so I could carry her words with me.
I listened to her read this to me on a 50 degree, blue sky day at the beginning of March. Beneath my feet were muddy, slushy puddles. Green shoots sprung up next to dirty snow banks. Fellow New Yorkers still donned their jackets, though unzipped, wisely not fully trusting spring’s first attempt at taking the stage. The birds sang joyfully on still bare branches. I squinted hard to find that first bud, convinced I might get to witness its unfolding, but the buds still had work to do before revealing themselves once again. Maybe they knew the temperature would drop 20 degrees just two days later.
I’ve never been to Ohio, where Beloved is set. But the transition of seasons here in New York doesn’t feel quite as theatrical as Morrison describes. Instead of one coming in and pushing the other off stage, it feels more like a long negotiation process. More like spring has to audition over and over before winter stubbornly surrenders its starring role.
This spring especially feels a little hard to trust. Last spring we were told to go back inside right when the flowers were blooming. So in some ways, we’re not just reemerging from a season of quiet, solitude, and rest, but we’re reemerging from a season of confusion, grief, and restlessness. This winter didn’t technically last longer than any previous winter, but I think our seasonal rhythm was thrown off last year and we’ve forgotten how to transition from one to the next.
And no, I’m not just talking about seasons in our calendar year. I don’t know if either Morrison’s description of Ohio’s seasons or New York’s back and forth are a healthy way for us to transition through things in life. We are almost always in some kind of transition. Maybe you’re in between jobs. Or in between school years. Maybe you are turning one year older, or learning how to live without someone. Maybe you’re packing up and moving from one home to another, or maybe you’re learning what it looks like to invite another human into your home through marriage or birth or a new roommate. There’s always something changing.
I have done both of these types of transitions. I have rushed one thing out and let the next thing take its place like a primadonna. When I do that, I find that I carry a lot of unresolved celebration and grief forward so I can’t really enjoy the new thing. I have also invited long negotiations and waffled back and forth between two things. When I do that, I’m not able to end one thing well and enjoy the newness of the next. Instead, I kind of fade out and in.
For a long time, I thought of any change as scary and hard. And it is. But I think I made it harder by skipping the transition phase. It’s really easy to just push ahead like a primadonna, especially in a place like New York City that glorifies a fast pace. It’s easy to look forward to one thing before the other is even finished. In order to avoid that uncomfortable in-between phase, I would hold on to one thing because I didn’t want it to end without knowing what was next. I wanted to make that transition season as quick as possible.
But in God’s grace, I found myself in lots of in-between places anyway despite my fierce attempts at moving forward. Or maybe I just recognized these transition seasons for what they were -- a gift. An invitation to be still.
Now, I actually love seasons of transition. To be clear, I really don’t love the phase right before transition. I don’t like that fogginess and the search for clarity. But I’m learning to like it, and I’m learning there are lessons there too. Transition is hard, but it’s also good and fruitful if we’re willing to spend time sitting with it. I think God uses transition to protect us, to point us back to Him, to till the soil in our hearts to prepare us for something new.
I want to invite you to consider the idea of looking forward to seasons of transition and taking them slowly. Because when we can see the good of transition, it allows us the freedom and the courage to end things well. So could you consider entering seasons of change from a posture of thanksgiving? Where you could look forward to that season right before transition? The season where things end? I don’t want us to just rush past that.
We rarely take a conscious effort to pause and remember back before looking forward. In our family, we have a practice that helps us do this.
My son turns four on the first day of spring. On the night before his birthday, we will gather as a family and play the song “Let’s Be Still” by The Head and the Heart. The four of us (my daughter, my husband, and my almost four-year-old son) will dance together in the in between with the lyrics “let’s be still” surrounding us. But before the song plays we’ll talk about some of the cool things God did during his year of being three – the friends he made at school, the teachers he fell in love with, the books that captured his heart, the things that made him laugh and the things that made him cry. We’ll ask him what he learned about God and we’ll tell him what we learned about him. He will probably tell us what he learned about dinosaurs too. We’ll acknowledge the things that were sad, and give them their space. We’ll pause and remember. I think being still for a moment steadies the shakiness that can come with transition. It slows down the time that slips away so quickly.
Any time we feel like time is rushing ahead and we need to just pause, be still, and remember that He is God, we ask these questions and we play this song. On birthdays, the night before moves, to celebrate a new job or mourn the loss of an old one, at the beginning or ending of a school year, and I’m hoping if our kids get married someday, we’ll dance to this song at their weddings. It’s a reminder to pause, take a breath, and remember what God has done.
I want to give you an opportunity to try this with something in your own life. Maybe you’re in the midst of ending something and entering a transition season. Maybe you have recently ended something and you need to go back and redeem the way it ended. Maybe you know you have something ending soon and you want to prepare for it. And if nothing comes to mind, use the new season. We’re all ending this long winter and welcoming spring.
Ask yourself these questions:
What are the things God did in this past season that I can celebrate? How?
Who are the people that walked with me or provided support? How can I thank them?
What did God teach me in this season? What did I learn about myself and the way God built me?
Is there anything I need to grieve?
Are there things I’m holding on to that I can let God prune away?
You can journal your answers or talk them over with someone. You can go for a long walk or just sit and reflect.
Then, let that season be what it was.
Can you trust God to hold those things for you? The celebration and grief and lessons? Can you walk into a season of transition fully surrendered to Him? Can you trust that He will give you the people, the things, the lessons you need to do whatever is next for you? Can you trust His timing? Can you let yourself be still?
I’ll be back in your inbox in May with a shorter note in the middle of spring.
Until then, know that I’m walking this season of transition with you. And if you want to chat about anything I wrote here, just hit reply.
Gratefully,
Jodie
P.S. Answering a few of these questions with you:
What I’m celebrating
A new routine of practicing stillness
The freshness & possibility of the season after being refined, but not consumed.
People who provided support this season through their words
Lorren Lemmons is a gorgeous writer. I’ve particularly been loving her poetry lately. This is my favorite haiku ever written. By anyone.
This essay by my dear friend Ruth about the tightrope moms walk.
A song I go back to often. If you’re still feeling the need to be in a hidden place even as outside things are blooming, that’s okay.
In one of the books we read to our kids, the child in it says, “You can be happy and sad at the same time you know. Sometimes it just works that way.” Everything in me believes this to be true, and I think we feel a mix of emotions most acutely at times of transition. I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to learn how to talk about our feelings. Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett is excellent and I think a must-read for all humans. I’m incredibly grateful my daughter’s school uses his RULER curriculum.
Is there anything I need to grieve?
My parents did not get to hug my son as a three-year-old. That will always be hard. But we finally booked tickets to visit Montana at the end of this month and I can hardly wait to fly from one home to another again.
Rejection. Even way in the past. The way it creeps back in at vulnerable moments is something I’ve been grieving lately. My good friend Simone has a beautiful breath prayer if you’re in that space too.
What did God teach me?
It’s okay to dream again.
Listening to audiobooks still counts as reading. This may sound like a ridiculous lesson, but to me it’s a grace. I’ve been using the Libby app. It’s especially fun to listen to books set in New York City as I’m walking around the city. But it’s also fun to finally read books that have been on my to-read list for years, like Beloved, which I loved.
loved reading - and the links!