Every time Spring Comes

    Look at this picture, and you will know, that even though it is going to arrive, spring always, always surprises us, as if we were never expecting it.....

Every time spring comes, it is a surprise.  

This is how it happens.  

You leave home without realising that you do not have your hat on and you forgot your gloves. And although it is nippy, you can bear it.  Your fingers are turning  red but  you can slip them into the pockets of your light fleece jacket over your wool shirt.  You are wearing two layers of tights, but not your ski pants that work like wind cheaters.  The sky is blue and bright.  Birds chirp earlier and longer in the day.  

The air is breatheable--and before you know you realise your lips have widened in both directions, reaching your ears.  

Must be spring, must be love!! And simple as that, you bow up at the sky, hoping someone is listening and whisper a thankyou.  The change, the contrast, the movement.  And a realisation that something in us remains the same, change of seasons are only for us to shift our mindset.  For those of us who live in stark climates, we get four chances every year to switch our mind set. We must use it.  And you folks, you live where the changes are not so stark...well, create them, at least four major times every year when you decide you are going to swich something in your life. 

Will end with a story from spring of 2005.  Teaching an international communication class in the US.  Asked the students to write an extra credit assignment telling me what they had learnt in that class.  The student wrote, 'among other things, your lecture on spring and easter, when you said that it is a time for renewal.  I walked out fo the class with a determination to quit smoking.'

iOne of the best, if not the best contribution of my academic career. 

May you renew yourself.