I’m putting the finishing touches on my updated four-volume book, One Day at a Time. This time it will be offered as a set of four books and will not be sold individually.
Each volume follows a season: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.
However, our country has a different kind of four seasons. What we have is: Hot. Hotter. Hottest. Flood.
While our weather is basically a sweat-and-splash festival, our lives still pass through all four classic seasons. We don’t live in a permanent spring and summer. We also have our fall and winter phases.
It’s a full calendar on rotation. Some days you’re blossoms and birdsong; other days you’re a windchill with opinions. That’s not a bug – it’s the operating system.
We forget this because spring is such a persuasive salesperson: Hope! Buds! Fresh starts! Spring is the motivational poster of seasons. But trying to keep life in permanent spring is like trying to keep a balloon perfectly helium-ed forever: adorable for six minutes, wilted by afternoon.
The philosopher George Santayana nailed the mindset: ‘To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.’
There’s your fork in the road. One lane is attachment and nostalgia. The other is curiosity and growth.
There is no such thing as ‘forever spring.’
When we replay ‘the good old days,’ the struggle gets cropped out. There’s a Russian quip that ‘the past is more unpredictable than the future’ because memory is a sneaky editor – it knows how the story ends. As writer Morgan Housel puts it, ‘It’s hard to remember how you felt when you know how the story ends.’ We survived, so the brain slaps on a warm filter and calls it vintage.
New seasons ask for faith, experiments, and occasionally, some reading of the instructions along the way.
Life is a river. Whether you splash, float, or attempt the heroic backstroke to yesterday, and either way, the current moves on. Refusing to move with it is how we miss the prime-time moments of later seasons:
The quiet flex of growing old with your favorite person and discovering attraction has more chapters than you thought.
Dancing at your children’s weddings.
Discovering new muscles: patience, perspective, the ability to order soup without checking your phone.
Feeling grief – and with it the reminder that love was here, real and luminous.
These aren’t consolation prizes. They’re headline acts – if you’re willing to show up.
A greenhouse environment with constant spring weather sounds appealing at first, but it becomes a humid, controlled space that leads to mental exhaustion. The absence of contrast makes joy lose its vibrant colors and become dull and uninteresting. The hot summer weather helps people understand the value of finding cool spots to rest. The cool temperatures of autumn help people become more alert. The cold winter weather forces people to engage in meaningful conversations because they cannot escape or hide from the chill.
I learned from business philosopher Jim Rohn many years ago how to live through the different seasons of our lives.
Label your season. Are you planting (spring), compounding (summer), harvesting/ curating (autumn), or recovering/ retooling (winter)? Naming it kills the panic that comes with trying to do everything at once.
Match the metric to the season. Spring isn’t for perfect outcomes – it’s for reps. Summer celebrates momentum. Autumn measures quality over quantity. Winter tracks rest, repair, and relationships=wrong metric, wrong misery.
Update your identity like software. Versions are allowed. ‘Who I was at 25’ doesn’t have to run your 45-year-old hardware. Retire features. Keep the essentials.
Curate your companions. Spring needs cheerleaders. Summer needs collaborators. Autumn needs editors. Winter needs friends who bring soup and unhurried questions.
Schedule nostalgia; don’t live in it. I refuse to join the group chat of old friends from high school days that post nothing but songs from the ’60s and ’70s, harping on the ‘Good old days’ and how bad the world has become today. Be excited about today and the possibilities tomorrow brings. Letting go of past seasons doesn’t mean they weren’t beautiful. Keep the lessons; retire the costume. Mourn (briefly) what won’t return and still be thrilled about what’s next.
So, let’s meet whatever knocks next – with gratitude for what was, courage for what is, and curiosity for what’s coming.
Pack light: keep the lessons, ditch the costumes. Dress for the weather – umbrella and boots for rain and flood, sunscreen for the heat, a sweater for the soul.
Step into the day you’ve been given, one day at a time.
Choose interest over nostalgia, growth over comfort, faith over fear.
Open the door, smile at the season waiting there, and make it beautiful.