May Flowers

For the past month, I’ve been watching the seasons change from my bedroom window. The grass has gone from yellow on a good day to bright shades of green, the streets from grey and empty to full of color and life as mothers and fathers push strollers and yell to each other from six feet apart. Their attire has changed too, from women in down coats and boots to now tank tops and shorts, children now in sundresses and baseball caps. Leaves have begun growing on trees and flowers have bloomed into beautiful shades of pink and blue and red. An aura of newfound respect and awareness of others has also pervaded the streets, as people finally move aside for one another, lending each other space on the sidewalk. And I’ve watched it all, morning after morning, from the quiet confines of my bedroom window as sleep dances on my eyes. I’ve taken part in it too, sometimes, putting on my sneakers and going for a walk outside. Getting hellos from neighbors and policemen that I never got before.

Time is a wonderful thing. It is both limiting and endless, restricting and boundless. It pushes and pulls you in every which way until suddenly you’re somewhere new without even knowing when you left the place you were before. Time is silent, lurking, but ever present, booming in our ears until we’ve had enough and pull the covers over our heads to drown out the alarm. We think that we are in control of time, we create calendars and schedules and put time in a cage and throw away the key until we are sitting at our bedroom windows watching the seasons change after the meetings have all been cancelled. The nights with friends ruined. The travel plans postponed, at best. And suddenly winter is gone. You won’t see snow until next year but you barely got to play in it this year, in fact you only saw it twice. You’re used to this, though, things changing. You’re just not used to watching it all happen, and I mean really watching it. This year, we have been lucky enough to witness the changing colors and the glimmers of sunlight peaking their way through our windows hesitantly, slowly, and subtly. We have watched hail hit the ground only to reveal a rainbow twenty minutes later, as if we are getting signs from above that even the angels don’t really know what to do right now. They’re just trying to have some fun like we are. But as beautiful as the green grass is, there’s a pit in our stomachs carrying the fear that we might watch the same leaves being born right now, fall from their mothers in a couple of months time and end up in a pile on the floor for us to rake up. Another season could pass us by as we sit passively observing its effects on our world from our bedroom windows. Greens and blues will turn brown and red and orange once more and we won’t know where it went because time moves without us whether we like it or not.

In the blue Volvo that my dad had while I was growing up, there was a small piece of wood hanging from the rearview mirror that read, “The time to rest is when you don’t have time for it.” We sold the blue Volvo after many miles and one too many food stains on the backseat cushions, but the small piece of wood still dangles in my head to this day, swinging back and forth as a reminder when I begin to push myself a little too hard.

Right now, we seem to have no time to do what we want but all of the time in the world to do everything else. We drank the need for productivity with our mother’s milk and think that anything less than that makes us useless. So now I sit here at my window wondering why I should let the world change without me. If my front yard is creating, maybe I should try too. If the angels are turning hail into rainbows before my eyes, maybe I should send it right back. I can rest from the usual, the day to day, the hustle and bustle of monotonous productivity that tears away at our senses of self and creativity, and I can find ways to add greens and blues to my life even from my window. To work does not have to mean sitting behind a desk, it can mean putting paintbrush to canvas, pen to paper, opening a book, cooking a meal, stepping outside. To work is to make the effort now to wave to the neighbors and policemen who you normally walk by without a glance. To work is to set the alarm a little earlier and resist the urge to drown it out, to let time in but not surrender to its power. To work, to truly work, is to take time and use it to your advantage. If the time to rest is when we don’t have time for it, then the time to reach out to friends is when it’s harder for us and we can’t just show up at their door, the time to exercise is when the gym is not at our fingertips so we have to find new, innovative ways to do it, and the time to visit grandma is now, over Facetime, or with a card, when she is alone and waiting for someone to call. To break the boundaries that the world has put on us and show it that we can grow too, we can bloom and prosper and thrive as the sun creeps in through our curtains trying to get a glimpse at the masterpieces we’ve created in our bedrooms. The connections we’ve formed across the world, the people we don’t know whom we’ve prayed for, the donations we’ve sent in honor of a loved one, and the people we’ve checked in on with no ulterior motive. The glistening, resilient web that we’ve woven between oceans and mountains and corners of the world that proves that the best way to build endurance is to endure. Let the seasons keep changing, and challenge yourself to change with them. And maybe, just maybe, April showers really will bring May flowers.