As this week ushered in the official commencement of spring on Monday, I’ve begun to keep a close eye on the landscape of the Lawn and the surrounding gardens. I’ve noticed myself going out of my way — at the expense of flirting with being undeniably tardy to the class to which I’m already running late — to walk such familiar settings on Grounds in anticipation for the color and lush capacity to return. Everything is reaching forward — reaching for the summer each plant can sense coming.
Spring is a time when we tend to adore something that we regularly oppose manifested in any other facet of our lives: the in-between. Spring is nothing but a glorified transition, dressed up in foliage. The very thing we tend to compliment most in our beloved Virginia seasons is the very thing we possess so little tolerance for in the seasons of our own lives.
Nearing the end of my second year, I’ve become increasingly aware of what an extended spring season I’ve been thrust into. With the halfway point of my college years in sight, I am now in between the dependent that left home two years ago and a new stage of independent adulthood that will inevitably follow graduation. However this in-between is not unique to finishing second year, but rather a state that permeates life at the University in totality. Most of us are in-between — we are in between requirements and a finalized major; we are in between internships and secured jobs; we are often in between relationships, plans crafted but not yet realized or a conquered obstacle and the one facing us head on.
While I want to categorize the in-between as a symptom of young adulthood, I don’t believe that’s true. Because our lives aren’t stagnant — and we don’t want them to be — I’m starting to see that I might find myself living in an in-between more frequently than a place of total and complete arrival. We are constantly asked to let go of the old, the familiar and the safe, and reach out for the new, the unknown and the uncomfortable we are moving towards. How can we not only exist, let alone grow and flourish, in these spaces?
There is an unavoidable element of patience to practice. Even if I woke up at the first sign of dawn each and every morning to water, prune and weed the gardens on Grounds, I would still not cause May to come faster than time would allow. The truth is that we are invited to labor in the gardens of our lives, but we can’t make things grow. For all that lies in our hands, there is a larger timing that irrefutably doesn’t. This is not passivity in the face of change, but rather calmness in allowing life to progress forward with a reverence and honor for each small step.
We wait, but we wait with a multifaceted perspective — one that desires to bring a future hope into the present reality with an awareness of the lengthy past. We hold where we have been in tension with where we want to go, aware of the change we’ve witnessed and desirous of changing all the more. We wait with reverence for the people we are, the stories we have and the way those stories are unfolding. We wait in the in-between not to begin, but to continue. In “A Spirituality of Waiting,” Henri J. M. Nouwen writes, “So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.” You have a story that is being developed in every in-between you navigate. I believe there is intrinsic worth in us and therefore also in our endless in-betweens.
I often find myself wishing spring in Virginia moved in an uninterrupted straight line, with each day growing degrees warmer, shades brighter and all the more colorful than the last. The reality is that it still snows in March. Growth is not a perfect projectile, simply all up from here and always increasingly beautiful. There was a cherry blossom tree just outside of Pavilion IX that bloomed the first week of March and has since completely browned, creating a disheartening illusion that perhaps we are moving backwards. Fear not. Regardless of the way those flowers may appear, summer is truly and faithfully coming.
There is beauty in growth through turbulent weather. I hope you can see that as you walk through Grounds this week, but more so I hope that you can see that in your own Springs — in your own in-betweens.
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