22: The ebb & flow of our seasons
/The capital-S Seasons of our lives are the most obvious ones that bring change. A new job, relationship, child, weather season... all of those usher in change in a big way, they define us and times in our lives very clearly.
Lately, I've been more interested in the little-s seasons of our lives. The seasons of joy and sorrow, grief and rejoicing, anxiety and confidence.
I think we too often fold those little-s seasons into the big-S seasons, conflating the entire season with only one feeling, assigning ourselves these absolute traits based on the ebb and flow of the human experience. I think we miss the fact that these little-s seasons could be looked at as STATES of our lives instead of TRAITS of our lives and our personhood.
If you're wondering how to move in and out of the seasons of your life with some sanity and grace, listen in.
**What follows is most of episode 22: Seasons of Our Lives from the Praise Through It podcast. Listen here, or read on!
I started writing this episode while sitting at my grandmother’s apartment. She was still resting, I was working. I was waiting for her to get up so we could watch either Friends or Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. I’d try Zoey first but would switch it if she didn’t get into it.
She ended up watching Mike & Molly, which is fine because when a 93-year-old wants to laugh at a sitcom, you set her up with the sitcom and let her laugh. (And then laugh with her, because some of that show is hilarious.)
It’s easy to think of someone like our grandparents as being in the last season of their lives, because it’s easy to think of seasons as being these huge chunks of time in our lives, especially right now as we in the western hemisphere await the arrival of Spring.
The weather seasons march with the other capital-S seasons of our lives: school seasons, relationship seasons of dating / engaged / newly married, etc., the various parenting seasons, the seasons of this career, that career, no career.
Those are the capital-S Seasons we think of when we consider our life’s story, the ones that clearly mark chapters of our lives, the ones that help us remember what happened when.
From this very clear time until this other very clear time, life was like this. These are good, important ways to consider our lives. Seasons help us know what’s coming. Seasons help us prepare, help us understand what’s going on and what’s probably going to happen.
An easy example is to think of teachers--to include homeschooling parents--is fall to summer. From a week before school until a week after school, you’re tired and doing miraculous, beautiful, big, important things.
I like these seasons. They’re why I remember the photos next to our bed were taken between 2008 and 2012: deployment, post-deployment, and a 2-year stint in Cincinnati. Those clear seasons are why I remember dates my family members don’t. Those seasons are why I remember what my husband was wearing when he waited for me outside my last class of the day the semester we met. Very clear timelines. They exist for a reason and I like them.
Also…
I’m a little more interested in the lowercase-s seasons. Because I think these do as much defining, if not more, than the capital-S Seasons of life. What do I mean by little-s seasons? The ones that live inside those big-S Seasons and are just as distinctive.
The seasons of prolonged joy.
The seasons of prolonged sadness.
The seasons of grief.
The seasons of rejoicing.
The seasons of gratitude.
The seasons of friendship.
The seasons of binge-watching a show.
The seasons of depression.
The seasons of anxiety.
The seasons of confidence.
Those are the little-s seasons that I’m not sure we pay enough attention to. I think we too often fold those little-s seasons into the big-S seasons, conflating the entire season with only one feeling, assigning ourselves these absolute traits based on the ebb and flow of the human experience. I think we miss the fact that these little-s seasons could be looked at as STATES of our lives instead of TRAITS of our lives and our personhood.
State vs. trait is a parenting principle I learned years ago. It speaks to the idea of parenting toward the state of our child--such as tired, rather than the trait of our child when he or she is in that state, such as angry. So I would focus on getting my tired panda to bed instead of arguing with my tired panda about why she can’t put her suction-cup toothbrush on the ceiling.
Parenting toward the tired instead of the angry. Tired is the temporary state, angry is the trait. If I parent toward the angry, shame gets involved and we can get ourselves to thinking our kid is just an angry kid; we assign this permanent trait. Whereas if I parent toward the temporary state of being tired, we all get rest and we’re all happy campers the next day. Hopefully.
What about doing the same for these little-s seasons?
What if we took the pressure off of ourselves and considered these seasons, especially the tough ones of depression, anxiety, grief, sadness, agitation as seasons--states of our lives instead of traits of our lives and our personhood? What if we didn’t assign them to who we are, and we just assigned them to this portion, this season, of our lives?
A season of depression can be just that, a season. The event or experience that pushed you into this season doesn’t have to make you a depressed person. By assigning depression to a season, that keeps it in a temporary state rather than assigning you a potentially harmful (and inaccurate) trait. Then, you work toward health by parenting yourself--caring for yourself--out of the state, instead of condemning yourself to the trait from now until forever.
You get out of the spiral of thinking, “This isn’t who I am, I don’t like this, this isn’t who I am,” and you say to yourself, “This is what I’m experiencing right now; it won’t be who I am from now until forever.”
A season of anxiety can be just that, a season. The event or experience -- or collection of them -- that are fueling you to feel anxious doesn’t have to make you an anxious person, period-end-of-sentence. By assigning anxiety to a season, that keeps it in a temporary state and reminds your brain and your body that you can and will come out of it.
The work you do and the help you get to move through these tough seasons still don’t assign these states into traits. When you’re in these tough seasons, doing the work and getting the help is an indicator of health, strength, courage, and maturity, not a resignation to a downward spiral of who you are are a human.
Now, what about those seasons on the other end of the spectrum? The joyous ones. The seasons of gratitude, achievement, rejoicing, and confidence. Should we consider those little-s seasons, too?
Here’s why I think YES.
To take the pressure off when we don’t feel that way anymore.
If we start to think of our lives as moving in and out of various seasons that don’t only include the greeting card events, we’ll be a lot softer with ourselves when our feelings change.
If we consider the joyous season of a new job as just that--a season of joy and novelty, then when that honeymoon period fades and the job isn’t as shiny to us anymore, we won’t second-guess ourselves and wonder if we made the wrong choice.
Think about that in terms of our relationships. If we consider the fact that our marriages and friendships will go through easy, joyous periods as well as difficult, annoying seasons, we’ll be easier on ourselves and our people because we’ll have the temporary state in mind instead of assigning potentially inaccurate and harmful traits.
Now, how do we do this?
It’s all in the language.
I was on vacation in a Spanish-speaking country last month, and thankfully I was with someone who is fluent in the language. I know some Spanish, having taken 6 years in HS many moons ago. At the end of the week I asked for a refresher on a few things, namely the verbs Ser and Estar.
Ser and Estar both mean a form of the verb to be, but here’s the catch -- Es means “is”, Estar means “be”. Ser is used for things that can’t change; Estar is used for things that can change.
I am happy. Estoy feliz.
I am from America. Soy de America.
I can change the fact that I’m happy--I can bonk my head on a cabinet corner. That would hurt and might put a damper on my good mood.
I can’t, however, change the fact that I was born at Genesee Hospital in Rochester, New York. My great-grandparents settled here after arriving from Italy in the early 1900s and I just do not have the time-traveling powers I wish I had.
In English, though, we have the same word for stating our happiness as we do for stating our nationality.
I am happy.
I am American.
Here’s what I think: just because we don’t have the technical language to distinguish between a state and a trait doesn’t mean we can’t borrow from the Spanish’s linguistic principles.
If you’re going through a season of depression and anxiety, it’s okay to say that.
I feel depressed. I feel anxious. I am depressed right now. I am anxious right now. Take the extra time to make it a temporary state rather than a permanent trait.
If you’re going through a season of grief, it’s okay to say that. I am grieving. I feel insurmountable grief right now. Add that little qualifier so you know: I won’t be grieving in this same, crippling way for the rest of my days.
Language for the happy seasons is a little different I think. We want to be joyful people, right? By nature, we want to experience that emotion on a regular basis. And if you’re a person of faith, scripture tells us we can be joyful as we keep the eternal perspective that God’s got it all under control. So why would we add a qualifier for the joyful seasons?
Because we end up being too hard on ourselves when we’re not jumping out of our skin with joy, which is an energy absolutely nobody can sustain. We get into this pit of thinking that if we’re not exuding joy or contentment or gratitude 24/7, there’s something not right. But that’s just not human. So if we consider our joy as part of who we are--a state--and not the whole of who we are, then we’ll be more gracious with ourselves when the joy fades and something else takes over for a bit.
I read this beautiful story of honor a woman named Joy Netanya Thompson wrote for her grandmother, Zelda. Zelda was orphaned young by the Holocaust, and she survived multiple concentration camps. She lost most of her family. Joy knew her as a woman who danced unabashedly, who wore bright red lipstick and had a bustling social life--her exact words. She also lost a son to COVID in 2020. That day, she wore black, no bright lipstick, and she cried. Down the road, Zelda was back to gleeful greetings on the phone when Joy would call her to chat.
In Joy’s story of Zelda, I saw more than Zelda’s resolve to live and choose joy. I saw a woman who understood life ebbed and flowed. A woman who understood life went on between and after moments of great heartache. A woman who understood that she could weep for one more heart she lost, and that it didn’t take away from her general feelings of mazel tov.
Changing our language has great power. It changes the course of our brains, our minds, and our bodies. We can’t change the actual laws of physics, and sometimes we can’t change our situation. We can, however, change our words, which helps us change our minds, and then we can change the frame we use to see our lives and ourselves.
If we treat the little-s seasons of our lives as ebb-and-flow states instead of permanent traits, we’ll be more gracious when we come out of the glorious ones, and we won’t get stuck in the mucky ones because we’ll remember they’re not forever, either.
Our lives are such an ebb and flow, and it is healthy for our language to reflect that. Because the only thing that absolutely does not ebb and flow is the presence and power of God.
The Lord is gracious to us in all seasons, big-S Seasons and the little-s seasons. In Psalm 48:14 he says, For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end. Psalm 23 talks about how God walks with us during seasons of rest, hardship, and restoration. Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us that seasons are for feelings and events, not just for greeting-card moments.
That’s just how it goes. And I really do believe that if we count all the seasons as seasons, not just the big, obvious ones, but the little-s seasons, too, then we’ll be more apt to see God working. We’ll be more compassionate and patient with ourselves and others. And we’ll get the chance to experience the fuller, more abundant side of life God so graciously offers us.
I was so excited to come back to Praise Through It after taking a month off from most of my screen-time. Instagram was off my phone for the entire month! I took two vacations, wrote a lot, read some, rewatched some of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, started a puzzle, took a lot of walks, and decided on some new limits.
And that’s what I know little-s seasons can do for us. They can move us forward during these big-S Seasons of life. Nothing big in my life changed from January 31st through today, but my heart is lighter, my feet and my mind are quicker--and that’s not just because of my Lenten decision to avoid sweets. I saw myself living in a little-s season of fog, made some new choices, and now I’m enjoying a little-s season of renewal. And all of that is human, and all of it is okay.
For the little-s seasons of your life, I want to send you with a blessing for this week:
May you embrace the humanity of the ebb and flow of your days.
May you encounter God in little-s seasons as He shows you how much care He takes in taking care of you.
May you enjoy the lightness of a seasonal change, whenever that might be for you.
And may you experience the fullness of riches God offers His children when they lay their hearts--in all seasons--at His feet.
Show notes:
My Holocaust-Survivor Grandmother Found Happiness Everywhere. I See Her in My Daughter.
Friends
Mike & Molly
Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist
Psalm 48:14
Psalm 23
Ecclesiastes 3
My breakfast face
Listen to the podcast episode of this blog
Become part of my FRIDAY CREW - quick, actionable ADULTING tips, usually using the framework of the Enneagram. I promise interesting. I promise a GIF. I promise helpful. Right here or right down below.
Sign up for Monday Morning Blessings: soulful meditations to start your week
