Mental Health: After Separation and Divorce, Spring Brings a Chance to Grow
I am looking out the window. It’s still so white. And I’m so tired of it being white. I’m looking at the trees and imagine what it’s going to be like when the white turns to green, when the dry plants turn into colorful flowers that smell so sweet I can eat them. Then I start thinking, if it wasn’t for winter, I wouldn’t look forward to my spring, summer and fall months.
I know that there will always be four seasons where I live. Just like I know that the sun will rise tomorrow and that things always work themselves out when I’m stressed out, when I’m broke and, when I’m lonely. The four seasons have been used as analogies for years. From looking at spring, for example, as being a birth of a new baby, a renewal, a new beginning, to the idea that winter is like someone in their late years.
Lately I’ve started to think of winter as being like a separation, a period with no color. The last few years or months of a relationship can seem colorless and dead like the bone-cold chilly winter days.
Spring means new growth. Life slowly starts to take a new shape. New flowers start to grow again, and sometimes they look and smell totally different from the spring and summer before. The divorce is exactly that; an opportunity to redefine and redesign yourself.
The summer months are the rosy, warm and fuzzy, terrific hot nights when you start to have fun with your singleness whereas the fall can simply be a time that you see yourself settling into your new lifestyle and preparing for change again, much like the leaves that are preparing themselves for the upcoming winter months.
Your challenge is to either stay colorless like you did in your separation or to add new colors and smells every now and then. Plant some new seedlings so that you can continue to grow into a beautiful blossom that will flower all year round. Some perennials, as you know, continue to grow and bloom all year long.
Every now and then, these plants need to be pruned, repotted and sometimes transplanted in a different area to experience a growth spurt.
