March 20, 2024

First Day of Spring

How to begin? I think I’ll start with my bona fides, even though its kind of obnoxious. I don’t own a car, I use public transit, I wash and reuse plastic bags, I hang my laundry to dry, I’ve banished serviettes in favour of secondhand cloth napkins, I make monthly charitable donations to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, I’m not a jet-setter, all my clothes are secondhand or from local designers, I’ve been refilling the same dish soap container for half a decade now, I only vote for politicians with climate plans, I eat meat just once a week if that, save veggie scraps for soup stock, I buy specialty toothbrush heads and mail them to be recycled, for heaven’s sake. I could go on, but I won’t. I know that climate change is real and I do a lot within my limited sphere of influence to do what I can to make a difference. I think this matters.

I think it’s also worth noting that I have anxiety, something I’ve probably always lived with, but which became untenable not long after the period in which people were marching around in the streets with signs that said, “WE WANT YOU TO PANIC!” Just following orders, and so I did, and eventually learned that years of panicking does a number on one’s psyche. At the end of 2022, I had a breakdown, the perpetual alarm bells going off in my head apparently serving no one, least of all me, and the natural world was certainly no better off for any of it.

Can we also talk about the weird Puritanicalism that people have always had about the weather? They’re either complaining about rain, or saying we’ll pay for it later. As though there is a ledger, and if anyone ever dare enjoy anything too much (at all?), we’ll all end up with the wrath of God. I remember a comment from the podcast Offline about how at some point about a decade ago on Twitter, it became established that maybe everybody should just be feeling bad all the time. Sometimes living in the year of our lord 2024 feels a little bit like living in the town from Footloose.

This time we’re living in right now is really tough for all kinds of reasons, and so many people are going about making it even harder by insisting that all of us need to feel guilty and anxious about sunshine on our shoulders, that we ought to read ominousness into unseasonable warmth in mid-March. (And when it snows a week later, no one even sends up a follow-up note telling us it’s fine to take a day off from existential dread!)

I get that most of those people are simply working through their own climate anxiety. I also have come to understand that other people’s anxiety is a huge trigger for me, that I feel compelled to manage and control it, and so I’m trying to step away from writing posts that are thinly veiled attempts at that. This is not what this. Instead, this post is an assertion about how I refuse to feel about a beautiful day. You only get so many beautiful days in a lifetime, and I’m taking every one.

Because feeling bad about a beautiful day makes nothing better, and, even worse, I fear that it acts to further disconnect people from the natural world. And yes, it’s discombobulating and upsetting to see the natural world offset from its natural rhythms. I’m going to tell you that I haven’t photographed a single snowdrop this year, because they emerged in mid-February, there’s been scarcely snow at all, and something about that wrongness is heartbreaking, but the snowdrops being too sad is not the way to approach all this. We owe the snowdrops better.

The caveat, of course, is the bonafides I started with. The status-quo is not sustainable. But also can we note the resilience of nature? The way that living things find a way, these tender shoots that emerge in spring, but which aren’t tender at all, and have always survived through snowstorms and ice-storms, and warm Februaries too? Faith and hope can’t be the only things—again, see my bona fides. Action is necessary, but if you’re already taking action, faith and hope are far from nothing, and you’re allowed to enjoy a sunny day.