Day 51 of Your Year to Wellness; Understanding Your Season

From my friend Patricia's backyard in Park Cities, Utah

For Every Season

There is a time and season for all things but we must also understand that our lives have a season too.

I live in Savannah Georgia and this year has been particularly warm. It’s February and we’ve had temperatures in the high 70s. People have been happy with this weather but I feel differently about it. My reason for this feeling came from a lesson taught to me by an Oklahoma farmer turned limo driver.

Several years ago while working in Oklahoma I landed to a warm winter day. I commented to my driver that he must be happy with the weather. I heard the brakes before I felt the sudden stop of the town car. The driver pulled over and told me a thing or two.

“Little lady,” he said. I knew I was in for a good old fashioned talking to, “Every farmer worth his crop knows that you need at least two harsh weeks of winter or every pest around is gone’ eat what you done planted.”

Wow, I thought to myself, this guy is a philosopher and a driver. He went on to tell me that the winter had been unseasonably warm and that a freeze was necessary to kill off the pests before time for harvest.

I apologized for my ignorance and he apologized for scaring me. As we drove to my hotel, he continued to school me on the seasons of harvest.

I am no longer happy about a hot winter because I know that our sand gnats will be the same size of the hummingbirds.

I have also come to see that our lives also go through a seasonal cycle. We must plant at the proper time and hibernate when necessary. Summer is not a time to play, but a time of canning and preparing for winter, which, as I have learned is necessary for ever life. Yes, winter makes us grateful for spring, but more importantly, it freezes off the unseen issues which grow right next to our harvest hoping to destroy it.

Because I spent so much of my life on an academic calendar, I still live and move as if the year begins in September. My time of harvest is not the same as that of another but it coincides with the calendar of my household.

Understanding your season will enable you to recognize the seasons of another. Are you in spring when your husband is in his winter? (Yeah, I know, lots to think about.)

When you begin to understand your own season, you can plan for the natural cycles that occur.

I’d love to go on with this but I have one of those early flights and you have work to do. Today, look at your life and think about the following:

·         When do you feel like your year begins?

·         What is the purpose of each season? (Even when I lived in San Diego, I could feel the impact of the seasons.)

·         Do you maximize the seasons of your life? Do you plant in the right time and wait for the harvest or do you become impatient and destroy the crop?

·         Recall a harsh winter in your life. What lesson did it yield?

·         Thank a farmer

We have become a nation of weather watchers, but we have no understanding of the seasons of our lives. Learn your season and live your life.

Be you, be present, be in season.

Bertice Berry, PhD.

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