This Too Shall Pass

To everything a season, I have heard that my entire life. “For everything there is a season…a time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance.”

It’s one of the many rhythms of life, one of the constants.

There is a dynamic that our generation has been taught. Embrace the seasons. Face them as they come. Learn the lessons and grow from them. There is always a moral of the story, push yourself to be a better version of yourself. Always be growing.

The problem comes in when we realize that nothing grows all the time. You can see that in fall and winter. The leaves drop off the trees. The grass turns brown. Bears hibernate. So if this is true for nature, why would it be any less true for humans?

I understand the heart behind the principle, don’t be complacent and don’t get stuck. But what I have seen for myself and so many people around me is that this creates an intense amount of pressure to be doing something all the time. We do things for the sake of doing things. We have lost the ability to just be for fear that we will miss some opportunity or we will be seen as though we are not in control of our own lives.

Let me let you off the hook though. The majority of things we cannot control. Life throws things at us that are beyond our ability to sway or manipulate. We are miniscule in comparison to this life we live, a drop in the bucket of eternity.

When we try to make things move by pure force of will, we wear ourselves out. In those moments, when we scavenge for answers that are not there, we miss the point of those seasons. The point is that it is ok to not be ok. It is ok to not have the answers. No one knows what to do 100% of the time.

Accepting that is part of the human journey. It is ok to just be for a while without a conclusion in sight. Rest in knowing that the beautiful thing about seasons is that they always change; they are never infinite, they come and go. What is today may not be tomorrow. You are on a journey. Some parts of that journey will be clearer than others, but it is a journey nonetheless. If you are in a season that you don’t have the answers for or don’t know how to grow in, it may just be your winter. But know, this too shall pass.