The Seasons of Life

I can see life as the seasons; actually life is a series of cycles inside a larger cycle that is like the seasons.

So in every season there are sub cycles.

The Seasons Overview

Spring.

In spring we are born… there is much ground to be tilled – things to learn like walking, talking. Seeds to plant, schooling, basic seeds like reading, writing, and math. Discovering what we can do – be it dance, music, art, running fast, seeing mathematical concepts easily, telling stories, making people laugh, thinking fast, being large and powerful, speaking well, learning languages… you get the idea. We spend the spring in smaller cycles, elementary school, Middle School, High School, College or University, maybe even an advanced degree.

In the spring the seeds are planted for many outcomes and when we leave school and go “out on our own”, it turns to the cycle of summer.

There are harvests as you put all the small things you are learning to use for your benefit, and there are times when you experience the end of a cycle, a winter of types, when a milestone has been reached and you say good-bye to your elementary school life, and start your middle school journey. Say good-bye to high school and home to go away to school. You might lose a pet, or a grandparent. You gain experience and insight of the summer, fall, and winter even though you are still in the spring.

Summer.

Even in the summer season, you will continue to learn.

Summer is long, and there is learning, working and harvesting all happening at once, and more importantly –progression. Your strengths are growing tall and strong. You are able to master parts of your life and have started to see rewards for your growth. You have new growth, that supports the tall stocks, and you continue to develop and have impact in your circle of influence. Summer we get to see how the seeds we planted turn out.

I love music… when I was done with 5th grade and going into 6th I couldn’t wait for school to start because in 6th grade we had a choir! I could go to school and sing! I remember I even rode my bike over to the new school during the summer and found the music teacher and told her I was going to take choir.

There were few things that excited me as much as that. If you know me, as I ponder on that, I think I never realized maybe until now how important it must have been to me that I would ride across town to hunt down the 6th grade music teacher. I sung in that choir and all through high school, going to All State three times and All New England my senior year. There were a group of us in that year, that were very talented. Everyone probably thinks this, but our class of 1974 was special… it was talented and brite and I think many of those friends have had successful lives… but anyway back to summer.

In summer you put what you know, what you’ve learned and who you are to work and see what seeds take root. The crop can change as the weather changes, and you might need to reseed here and there as the world changes, but throughout the summer you grow. When I was 26 and recently married I thought [key word] about where I was and how on earth I had gotten there. I was 2,800 miles from where I grew up and working in an industry I hadn’t even thought about until I started working in it in 1978 while I had come out to the west for an entirely different purpose. I had graduated in college in the field I worked in – unusual even now, and had been there I guess about 5 years.

On a cross country trip, my wife and I had run out of music and her father, in a different car, I knew was a trained speaker and in fact had pioneered two toastmaster clubs in our city. He listened to “motivational tapes”, and while I had thought little of their value up to this point I asked him to give me the best one he had as a relief from our musical dead end.

The tape was Earl Nightengale’s “The Strangest Secret” and it changed my life… literally. More on that later, but the important thing to note is that in the summer, you continue to learn and grow… fact –

many have said this – you learn more after you get out of school than you did while in school.

So while the seeds have been planted in the spring, what you learn in the summer will nourish those seeds, and will impact how they grow.In this season you are able to add value to what you do and there for your life… adding value is a whole topic unto itself, but the short version is:

The only way to leave a trace that you were here on this planet is to add value.

Value is something that outlasts, or has impact outside of yourself. I have listened to many teachers, and to be clear I mean self development teachers, speakers, some might be considered gurus or positive thinking people, but the fact that their words either original or borrowed have impacted my life reflects upon the value they gave me.

So in summer we live in that great time when we are learning, but also generating a harvest, or should I say beginning to harvest as we continue to learn and plant.

Fall.

I am now in the Fall of my life.

There is plenty to do, still things to learn that could benefit the eventual harvest in the late fall, but now you have enough experience and distance from where you start to see patterns. You realize the impact poor decisions make on everything and everyone associated.

You have lived long enough to see the cycles of planting and harvesting, or reaping and sowing, and you can see what path lives take.

I am not done growing… or planting for that manner. There are many things I want to learn and do. I believe that now I can do more faster and better because of my experience. I know how things work in general – again there are always exceptions [the unfairness of life]. But I am excited about what lies ahead. The best fruit is the last to ripen.

life has just accumulated to the point where the harvest naturally starts to take place…

if you were able to sow those important seeds along the way.

Winter.

Winter is the final season. It can last a long time, or you can believe you are still in the fall when you see those signs that there has been a change of season. Friends start to leave this life. You bend down and it isn't as easy to get back up. I mean in a physical or psychological way.

Winter is when you are done with your toil and hopefully can look back and feel like you have touched another’s life for good. There is still more to learn – we can never know it all –

and if we’re lucky we can share what we have learned to shorten the journey for the next traveler. That’s what this is about.

As I stood on the shoulders of great thinkers like Earl Nightengale, and Tom Peters, and many others, they shortened my journey. Even though I am still in the fall, I feel the urge to share what I think and how I think. Maybe that can help shorten another’s road.