You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Anymore

Every May, I find myself staring out the window longer than usual. Watching the trees decide what version of themselves they’re becoming. One day the branches are bare and uncertain, the next they’re impossibly green, reaching outward as if they never doubted spring would come. This year especially, the weather has felt impossible to read — cold rain one morning, startling warmth by afternoon, wind that asks for a coat and sunlight that convinces you otherwise. I keep stepping outside unsure of how many layers I’ll need, and somehow it feels like more than a question about clothing. It feels like the question beneath everything right now: how do we prepare for a world that changes by the hour?

These are the questions we tackle in almost every conversation. Friends say their business doesn’t look like it did 2 months ago. For some it’s a lack of job security and for others, no work and no promise of even an interview. The word “artificial” becoming old hat. Infiltrating everything we do and think.

I think many of us are living inside that uncertainty. We’ve built lives around calendars, plans, goals, projections — quiet systems that help us believe we have some say over what happens next. And maybe we do, to an extent. But lately, it feels harder to ignore how much of life exists beyond our managing. There is discomfort in realizing how little control we actually hold. Not because uncertainty is new, but because the illusion of certainty has become harder to maintain. We are in flux — personally, collectively, emotionally. So many people I speak to are questioning who they are becoming, what matters now, what still fits and what no longer does. Like the weather in May, nothing seems stable long enough to fully trust.

And yet, nature continues without panic. The trees do not rush themselves into bloom because a warm day briefly arrives in March. The gardens don’t collapse in despair after three days of rain (but … foundations can). Everything seems to understand instinctively what we struggle to remember: transition is not failure. Seasons overlap awkwardly. Growth rarely looks graceful while it’s happening. There are stretches of time that feel muddy, directionless, suspended between versions of ourselves. Nature does not apologize for this liminal space. It simply keeps moving, slowly and faithfully, toward renewal. Rebirth. Beauty.

Maybe that’s why I return to it again and again. I walk incessantly. Not because nature gives me answers, but because it reminds me I don’t always need them immediately. There is comfort in watching something ancient continue its rhythms despite uncertainty. The buds still open. The light still shifts. The rain still nourishes what we cannot yet see growing underneath the surface. We see our trees bend and sway in the wind - in appearance this is what we notice - but it takes a moment of pause to remember their immense root systems and all they hold. Sometimes the bending is a response to the storm, and sometimes it yeilds to toppling.

So, for now — to trust that we, too, are allowed to evolve without fully understanding what comes next - is in a large part, our human work. To dress for the day as best we can, step outside anyway to face the day ahead - with perhaps a remarkable event in the balance.

To let the season teach us how to live inside change. By far, my favourite teacher.