Replay, Seasons in a Woman’s Life

This is probably the last I will do of ‘replays’, I didn’t save much of my material when I updated or deleted things from my website. But this is one that I like to reread, just to remind myself when I feel overwhelmed by the clamor of this modern life.

(Jan 21, 1999)

Seasons and women are twining together within my thoughts, the blurring and disintegration of the two, and our losses because of it. The thread of explanation:

We (our society and our own selves within it) try to create a seasonless environment. Changes and the need to make adjustments just make us irritable, such interference with our plans and schedules! We get this false sense of control from heating, cooling, and humidifying systems, from the mini environments of our cars, homes, and offices, and it extends into our mental and emotional environments. We have these ideal pictures of what we will accomplish and how we will fit living into our frameworks so carefully wrought. But weather, electrical supply, and other personalities don’t always amenably comply, and we wake up exhausted and disappointed from trying to form our world. That can be a blessing, you know: to step outside of the perfect, tight, and well-run schedules. There is even a cliche’ for it…smelling roses.

In a woman’s life there is such a crush of busyness that runs from the mid-twenties to the mid- thirties. It seems we must become so many titles and fulfill so many expectations that we build our card houses precariously balancing everything and hoping all the while that all will “just stand steady”. Please, please, please.

But life as a whole is a progression of seasons, seasons of learning, seasons of doing, seasons of resting. There are beginnings and progressions and endings, and we are wise to observe such things. Because we may artificially mask the changes of the seasons does not always mean we should. Our means are tools for us to make our adjustments, not our weapons for fending off phases forever. We would not choose only sunny days all the time if we really thought carefully about it, and we would not stay fixed at twenty years old, or in a high state of romance, either, if it was static and false. A woman’s life has phases like the moon and seasons of nature, each with its own particular joys and chores.

If I garden like crazy, working on too many plans, where is my joy in the June’s special rose effects? It will not be repeated for another year and maybe not in that special way in a lifetime. So, seasons of marriage, and children, of skills and production, of caring and being cared for, wax and wane. We have a marvelous skill of discernment of time, and we have only the need to take the time to put it to use. “Lord, teach me to number my days”.