Reflections From Spring 2023

There are patches of yellow on the hillside that are visible from my balcony. They must be spring flowers this time of the year but they also look like burnt patches of shrubbery. Maybe during this unseasonably cool spring, it’s a mental harbinger of the desert-like summer that comes to this area. The mind projects the future based on how the present seems and if anxiety speaks, then the future that is imagined is contrary to how the present appears. 

If the present is more or less calm and content, you fear the worst in the future because the mind, when left to its own devices in boredom after its basic needs for safety, food, and rest have been met, will imagine a life that is different from what it knows. It will be afraid that a change, which is inevitable if a future is to come, will take away what is in the present. Your perception of the present is tinged with the future. You expect what you do not have now.

Sometimes the seasons do bleed into each other. Dry heat pulses in the spring air as if it has just arrived and is trying to stretch its arms and legs in its new home. But I wonder how much of it is my anticipation and how much is a feeling of the change that has already begun to take place.