"Live each season as it passes; breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." Henry David Thoreau
Each year has its seasons in much the way a natural human life has stages of development. Spring is the season for birth and rebirth. Trees, bare branches braced against a wintry sky, sprout the buds of birth of their summer foliage. Crocus, the tulip, and the iris push through the warming soil, bringing a splash of color to the landscape. In the spring of our lives, we too are born. Like the new colt, wobbly on its new way, we learn about the world. We learn to function, how to talk, to walk. And as a child we are fully alive in the present moment. The intensity of a child at play is the "live each season" that Thoreau proclaims. Hence the child develops, "breathing the air, drinking the drink, tasting the fruit" and by turning a cardboard box into a castle, making an afternoon into a trip back in history. No one teaches the child this ability, much as the robin does not teach her baby birds to fly. There is a naturalness to "resign yourself to the influences of each", to be so involved that time is not a consideration or if it is, it seems to stop.
As spring turns to summer, the trees fill out, the farmer's crops grow in the fields, and for much of the animal world, what are babies one day, are young adults the next. Summer is the time of maturing where all nature grows up to fulfill its purpose, its raison d'tre. In the summer of our lives, it is time for us to mature. And so we move from spring toddlers to schoolboys and girls maturing in the summer sun into teenagers. The meaning of life in the natural world is to live, to reproduce, and therefore prepare for the next generation. We are not so different in that we participate in the natural world and are subject to its rules. There is a difference though, between us and the rest of creation. It is just that we don't think about it in the long days of daylight during summer. As the season closes, nature is at full maturity. The corn is ripe for harvest, oak trees rain down torrents of acorns, and all day long one can watch the squirrels busily working to gather the harvest for the winter ahead. These animals and plants in late summer are all about preparation. Preparation for their life in the days and months to come. Our schoolchildren prepare their lessons, thereby preparing their mind. Their play becomes organized and through their play, their bodies grow and fill out into maturity. When one lives as suggested by Thoreau as children do naturally, one achieves that which he urges, to "resign yourself to the influences of each."
There comes a time when one is sufficiently mature to be reflective and has the insight to begin to see that each person is but a part of the whole. Time changes, and in this alone is Einstein's theory proven, for as a young child, the concept of time and its passage is different than when one is older. The proof is in your memory, for you will remember the eternity that stretched from Labor Day until Christmas when you were young. And from one birthday to the next, several eternities. I do believe that I was six years old for at least five years, or so it seemed. But having reached maturity, nature turns to the harvest, that time of season to reap.
It is a time of year when a fawn is mature enough to be weaned, and it understands that it is part of a herd, a group larger than itself. In the autumn of our lives, our world has grown. One understands we are only a part of it, not central to it. Here is where the relativity of time really enters. In adulthood, the days click by like telephone poles viewed from inside a fast-moving train. What once seemed eternity, for example the time period between Labor Day and Christmas, is now no more than the blink of an eye. I know, I have seen the change in the relativity of time in my life, some natural changes and some man made. But as I write on this fall day, I just know that the local stores are gearing up for the Christmas season. Each year it is earlier than the year before, an indirect commentary on the way men live their lives. Some live in the future, others in the past, both unable to live each season as it passes.
Overly focusing on the future or dwelling on past events, we miss today. That doesn't happen in nature. The bee knows instinctively to gather nectar from flowers while they are blooming in order to have honey for the winter. Without prompting a plant knows to redirect nutrients and water to the blooming flowers away from the leaves to produce as many seeds as possible. In the fall, a black bear, living in the present moment, gorges herself for her period of hibernation. Why is it that all of nature, especially in the fall, is so able to live in the present moment, while men and women dread the future, remember the good old days?
One of the most often used quotes is attributed to Thoreau, "most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." The first half is a misquote from Thoreau's Walden. It should read,"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation... There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." What has been attributed to Thoreau in the second part may be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "From the Voiceless": "alas for those that never sing. But die all their music in them." Confirmed desperation is a term with connotations not unlike the midlife crisis that afflicts so many.
When humans are in "midlife crisis", it is fall. The fruit has matured. Nature's reason for our being is ending. One has spent one's life busily working, amassing, so that instead of owning things, the things own the man. We all go through this, and we think we are alone in it. That is why we are quiet, quietly desperate, not wanting our neighbors to know of our despair. We have spent many a day without a sense of the day passing. We have no time, yet we live in time, minute by minute, hour by hour, the length of which has not changed since our childhood. Thoreau notes in Walden: "things do not change; we change." So although our nature knows better, in the fall of our life we may find ourselves desperate, desperate to "breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit." Often one feels that life is passing by like a swift, flowing river, the time slipping away. As he notes, confirmed desperation is called resignation where one gives up, resigned to a fate not of one's choosing .
As the first blasts of winter's cold breath freeze the landscape, so too our movements begin to freeze up, joints stiff with aches and pains as fall turns to winter. As freezing temperatures slow and stop the growth of plants and inhibit movement of animals, we are forced to slow down. In an odd way, it's as if we gradually return to the uncoordinated, immobile dependency that we had as toddlers. Winter is the time when nature returns to its beginnings. Now in winter, snowbound in our cabin, one is given some time back. Time to think and reflect, just as winter gives the plant life and the hibernating animals a "time-out". That wintery cabin-fever time allows for reflection, if one is lucky. Then one may come to realize as Thoreau did, that "the cost of the thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run."
As in the natural course of the seasons, fall turns to winter and the new life of spring withers and begins to die, so to, do we suffer the same consequences. "Time and tide wait for no man." is an old English proverb. It's interesting that the writer included tide in this saying which in old English refers to a season as in "good tidings". The modern connotation is of the rise and ebb of the sea. It paints the picture of man's participation in and subjection to the laws of nature. Scott Peck, author and psychiatrist, has two ideas that are pertinent. The first pertains to our following the initial advice of Thoreau. Peck writes, "mental health increases as we pursue reality at all cost." To be able to live each season as it passes and resign oneself to the influences of each, we must be able to see and comprehend the reality of our life. Despite the pain and suffering it may cause, we must suffer the cold stinging winds and at times the raging blizzards in order to live our life fully. Peck's other thought is that, "everything that happens in life is there to aid our spiritual growth." It helps to remember things like this when, like evergreens in winter, we are covered in snow and ice so heavy that the weight breaks our branches.
Life has meaning. On its most basic, simplistic level, life is meant to be lived naturally. In the Garden, people were attuned to this natural law. It is when one takes the opposite tack that our ship runs aground. We worry, we're afraid of this or that, we are "stressed-out". If the opportunity presents, speak to a person who has lived a long life, who may even be close to death. You will find them at peace, generally unafraid, accepting the effects of winter as part of the natural course of life.
When winter closes in with its gray days of shortened hours of sunlight, nature accepts it at face value. Men tend to rail against their fate, to battle against the inevitable. It is our lot to be at odds with nature ever since the Fall, and is what distinguishes us from the rest of nature for we are endowed with a supernatural aspect. This moves outside the sphere of nature's four seasons. The meaning of our life is that we are natural beings called to, as articulated at Walden Pond, "Live each season as it passes; breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."
At the same time, we are also supernatural. In that, having been endowed by our Creator, there is an additional season that applies to man. This supernatural "season" transcends our mortal, natural existence that we share with the rest of creation. This part of our make-up is one of the best proofs of a Supreme Being, an Eternal Creator. This "season", in which all people live, is timeless, changeless, and ever before us. Does one ever think about how a person will risk his safety for a stranger or defend an ideal to the death? If one honestly meditates upon this behavior, not seen in the natural world among other creatures, one cannot deny man's difference from the rest of nature, which is the spark of eternity breathed into us at conception. Just as the year journeys through its seasons, one's life is a journey but with an extra season called eternity. Where the season's journey is cyclical, man's path is linear, birth to death to eternity. In this lies our discontent and fears for the future. The linear nature of our life's path means we travel new ground each day and do not know where it will take us. St. Augustine wrote, "If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing."
The seasons following their circular path are reliable and consistent. The rest of nature does not have to concern itself with anything other than "to live each season as it passes." I am convinced of this, in large part because we face the maw of the future, the seemingly unending abyss of eternity. But in this peering into the crystal ball of the future and facing our fears lies our life's meaning. We can dream, imagine, create and love, the love of agape, of wanting the best for others.
Thoreau also has an exhortation for our close. It resounds with the meaning of life, much as when Fredrich Nietszchke said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." The why is one's life's meaning, illumined as though the sun's rays are concentrated upon them: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."