Our own spring can happen at any time of the calendar year. But it is always following by a period of withdrawal. Winter leads into spring. What is going on during the moments in our life in which we retreat? We often think of those periods as something to be avoided, something bad, something to overcome.
But without these periods, nothing new can grow. Growth is more than renewal. It is a type of transcendence in which something is given a new chance to begin over, to re-think one’s life, to find new impetus, to find new interests, to, no matter what the past has been, to begin with a clean sheet of paper, a new canvas, a new chance.
But renewal is more than the chance to begin again. It is the drive to make the most of the possibility. From where does this drive come? From our human instinct to create. It is the essence of our dynamic urge, to make something new, to explore unseen territory, to engage life to the fullest.
Regeneration is almost always propelled from its opposite. It is a type of death followed by a type of resurrection. And the sequence does not have to be juxtaposed chronologically. Winter may have been spread out over years, life had seem to drift to limitation or burden or malaise or encumbrances of various sorts. And then, maybe out of nowhere, spring emerges suddenly and a new chapter opens to you.
But, for this type of regeneration to lead somewhere, it must have an object of its desire, so to speak. Just the same way the expression goes “In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” so in this type of spring, the object of thoughts is also love, but not the romantic kind, the creative kind. There is something new we want to create, something we haven’t created or done before, and because of this, the full cycle of regeneration takes its place in your life.