Be Gracious with Your Ever-Evolving Self
There is space for all
Do you see it here and there? How to romanticise January? How to fall in love with February? Let’s romanticise March. OK. Probably, apart from the first one that was once there because of January blues, I made them up.
I dislike the word romanticise, but I try to understand so fervent need for it in society. The initial appeal of romanticising one’s life was probably born from a need to find meaning in the mundane when everything larger felt out of our control. You might not be able to stop a war or fix the climate, the thinking went, but you can fix a cocktail. You can place daffodils in a jar and let the sunlight catch them just so.
At first, this was a survival mechanism. We clung to the tiny pleasures: the warm mug of coffee, the slow walk to get a fresh baguette from a local boulangerie (or simply a shop), and the lining of a Sunday morning. These moments offered stillness. But we didn’t just notice them somewhere along the way—we began to narrate them. We elevated the act of filling a water bottle into poetry and edited our lives into short videos with the gravity of documentary footage. What began as a way to cope quietly became an aesthetic performance.
This shift birthed what the internet now calls main character energy.
But when we insist on starring in our own show, we sometimes lose sight of the supporting cast. Our self-focused rituals—our baths, our books, our colour-coordinated snacks—start to push out the world beyond them. We forget that romanticising life was never meant to isolate us. It was meant to open our eyes.
If you stop to think about it, every season brings its own language. Each season arrives with its own package of emotions, colours, and weather—unexpected, unrepeatable. We can’t control the seasons, yet we try to control everything else—our interviews, relationships, and even our feelings.
Humans chase control because uncertainty terrifies them. We believe that if we script our interviews, perfect our relationships, and regulate our emotions, we might be spared disappointment. But the seasons laugh quietly at such arrogance.
The Taoists would say: Let things flow naturally forward however they like. Our real task is not to control but to participate—to meet each season and moment with curiosity instead of fear. Like leaves surrendering to the wind, we must also learn to fall gracefully when it is time and bloom again.
Our minds, like our years, cycle through seasons. Sometimes, we think in focused, structured lines; other times, our thoughts scatter like autumn leaves, connecting dots we didn’t even know existed. Neuroscience and psychology call these shifts many names: focused and diffuse thinking, exploitative and exploratory modes, or the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But the rhythm is universal: effort and rest, precision and play.
Just like thought, these rhythms shape our interviews, relationships, and emotional terrains. An interview may appear to be a linear exchange—a sequence of prepared questions met with rehearsed responses—but in reality, it operates on subtler frequencies. We begin in a ‘summer’ state: composed, analytical, and self-editing. But then, as the conversation settles and the performance softens, the leaves begin to fall. Tension recedes. Voice levels drop. Breath returns. Silence becomes charged. This is the turning point. This is when we cross from the factual to the felt. The interview evolves from reportage to revelation.
Relationships, too, thrive in alternations. There are days for solving problems, clarifying misunderstandings, and making plans and those for just being together without agenda. Emotions follow similar tides: intensity and calm, expression and retreat.
Even the oldest human traditions mirror this pattern. Our ancestors, attuned to changing landscapes, evolved strategies to shift with the seasons. In the dry season—what we might call winter—humans become more neurotic, cautious, and resourceful, going into ‘adaptive mode’. We conserve what we have, let go of what weighs us down, prepare, and survive. Paradoxically, this is also the time of warmth, longer rest and tender support for those closest to us.
“My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.”
- George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Summer, by contrast, is a time of outward expansion. With security comes the chance to dream. Creativity blooms. We build, we explore, nature laughs and invites us to laugh too.
“And so with sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with summer.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Yet, just as winter holds beauty, summer holds its own dangers. With comfort comes complacency. With abundance, waste. When everything feels easy, we forget that nothing lasts forever. Even joy has a cycle.
That’s why the seasons within us matter so much.
Unlike the weather outside, our inner seasons don’t follow a calendar. We carry our own Julys and Januaries, shaped not only by external events, but by our interpretations of them. A summer mindset says: there is enough, let’s grow. A winter mindset says: hold close, endure. Both are valid. Both are necessary.
Trouble comes when we mistake one for forever. A life stuck in endless summer might forget gratitude. A life stuck in winter might forget hope. As B. Oakman so insightfully reminds us: “Every season is one of becoming, but not always one of blooming. Be gracious with your ever-evolving self.”
