Having spent all my life in areas with four distinct seasons of the year, I don’t think I have given their existence enough credit. A lot of people I spoke to seem to have one favorite season of the year (usually the summer) and wish that season lasted the entire year. I think it’s a naive approach–in the very least, it ignores some important effects that the seasons have on our lives.

I like thinking of seasons in terms of how they make me feel, rather than what they enable me to do. While they certainly enable some kinds of activities and not others (biking in the winter is hard!), I think the most fundamental changes in our lives come deep within, in connection with how we feel. The activities that the seasons enable are just a superficial layer that serves to satisfy those fundamentals (for example, sure, biking may be hard in the winter, but if I feel like I want to be more healthy and fit, I can most definitely start going to the gym in the winter). This is also why I probably belong to a small minority of people for whom

• the summer is not the favorite season of the year, and
• having that favorite season last the entire year is a bad idea

Let me start with the latter. For one, the cyclical aspect of the seasons (the spring “awakening”, the summer “peaking”, the autumn “deconstruction” and the winter “hibernation” form a fairly smooth cycle) has a lot of influence over our lives. The changing seasons, in my opinion, are a large driving force behind changes we make in our lives. Usually these changes are a few steps removed from the seasons, but I think they are highly correlated to a lot of decisions we make in our lives. If we experienced one season, that major driving force wouldn’t exist and we would be less inclined to change.

Why is change good? It allows you to explore, know yourself more, and learn. It forces you to compare different states you’re in, which forces feedback, which allows you to get better. Without change, we get complacent, we stop improving. David Sedaris joked that the Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day, and perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in this.

So having said that, the fact that the seasons need to be changing for me to appreciate them means that they are all important to me (even if all they do is facilitate some transformation). Which season is my favorite? Well, the summer makes me feel energetic and active, but rarely induces changes in my life. I see it more as a season to reap the benefits of the hard work you’ve done prior to it (the most obvious example here are those of us, who spend the winter and the spring going on all sorts of diets to “get in shape” for the summer). The season I like the most, without a doubt, is the autumn. Not because it’s a depressing manifestation of death in nature. Here’s why:

Autumn is an explosion of stimuli to the senses. The sight of leaves of all possible hues; the sound they make when it’s windy or when you step on them; the crisp, sharp touch of the first gust of cold air; the smells and tastes accompanying the season (apples, cinnamon and various other spices) all compound to create a vivid image of something very aesthetically pleasing. It makes autumn a very “visible” season. At least for me, this creates an impetus for reflection. Moreover, we have to start giving up on some activities (put away that sailboat, stop running outside), and that gives us an opportunity to rethink our purpose, our schedule, our goals. It forces us to change many aspects of our lives.

As a sidenote, the seasons of the year have an interesting property that I have noticed in other sequences as well (for example, the phases in my life): while they form a rather continuous, smooth cycle (it’s not as though on September 23rd all leaves suddenly fall on the ground, dead) where changes from day to day are fairly indistinguishable, holistically one can tell very well the high-level differences between the seasons (similarly, in my life, I don’t suddenly decide to drive to NYC instead of taking the train, yet in retrospect I can identify a clear phase when I took the train, and a clear phase when I drove).

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 23:32 and is filed under changes/cyclical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.