Watching the Season Change as Practice

There is a tree on the way to the place you go for coffee. Or there should be. If there is not, find one. The practice begins with the tree.

The first week, you notice the tree. The notice is small. You walk by, and the tree is there, and you register it for half a second. Bare branches. Or full branches. Or branches that are beginning the slow yellow of October.

The second week, you notice the tree again. By the third or fourth week, the tree has become a small appointment. You pass it. You look at it. You move on. The looking takes no time. It does not slow your day. But the looking is the practice, and over months, the practice does a small thing that nothing else does.

The thing it does is this: it grounds you in the actual year. The actual year, the year of the planet, has almost nothing to do with the year of the calendar. The calendar marches in identical thirty-day blocks. The actual year is messy. February is shorter than March. November is dark by four. April is when the light starts to feel different. May is when the air smells different at six in the morning.

Most people, in most modern lives, have only an abstract relationship with the actual year. They know it is autumn because the calendar says so. They have missed the three weeks when the autumn was arriving, and they have lost the small joy of watching it happen.

The tree is the antidote. The tree is honest. The tree is not influenced by the weekly news cycle. The tree is going to do what the season tells it to do, on the schedule the season provides, and your only job is to show up and look.

Over a year, the tree becomes a small calendar of its own. The first bud. The first full leaf. The week the leaves are most green. The week they start to fade. The first leaf on the sidewalk. The week of the peak color. The day the last leaf comes down. The bare winter version. Each of these arrives without consulting you, and you are present for all of them because you walked by.

Other things work, too. A garden window. A river you cross on the commute. A particular corner of the park you visit on Sundays. The point is to pick one thing and look at it on a schedule that is faster than your memory of looking at it.

Over a year of this, the seasons stop being a background. They become a thing you live in, with specifics. October has details. June has details. The details accumulate. The accumulation is what people mean when they say they pay attention.

The tree did not change anything in the world. But the tree changed something in your relationship to a year, and over enough years, that is a substantial thing to have changed.

<!-- beal:expanded:v1 -->

The seasonal noticing is best done in a fixed place. The window over the kitchen sink. The bench at the small park. The corner where the bus stops. A single fixed point, returned to often, produces a year of small data more honestly than ten varied vistas do. Variety is the enemy of seasonal noticing. The same view, seen weekly, becomes a calendar in itself.

Try to name what is happening this week before you check it against the date. The first leaves are turning. The lilacs are still a few days away. The pavement is colder underfoot in the mornings than it was three days ago. These small predictions, made before you consult the calendar, are how the body re-learns the year it was born into. The body knows more than the calendar does, given a chance.

Notice which seasons reveal you to yourself most clearly. Most people have one season in which they are unmistakably themselves and three seasons in which they are partly borrowed from someone else. The season of clearest selfhood is worth honoring. Plan the year around it, when you can. Make sure the calendar leaves room for the small private rituals you only do when the light is a particular kind of honest.

Seasonal noticing also reorders grief. A loss in autumn lands differently than the same loss in spring. The year carries the loss forward and brings it back, slightly changed, every twelve months. Watching the seasons is partly watching the small re-arrival of old losses, less sharp each time, becoming part of the background pattern. The pattern is the year. The year is a long, slow practice of paying attention.

Pair the practice with a small annual document. Write a paragraph in the journal on the first day of each season describing what you have noticed in the past three months. Over a few years, the paragraphs build into a small archive of seasonal attention. Re-reading the archive in middle age has a particular weight. The years compress in the calendar. The years do not compress in the seasonal archive. Each year, four paragraphs, each one slightly different from the same season last year. The archive becomes a kind of proof that the years were lived in particular rather than in general. It becomes a small antidote to the felt sense that the years are passing without distinct texture, which is one of the background anxieties of any life that has begun to fill out into the middle. The seasonal archive replies to the anxiety in concrete form.

Step outside before the day fills up and stand still for a minute. What is the air doing this week that it was not doing last week? What does the light feel like on the skin? Most of the season's information is available in the first thirty seconds of standing still outdoors. The minute of standing still is the small daily check-in with the year. It costs nothing. It is, over decades, one of the more underrated practices a person can develop.