Spring Rebirth, Renewal and Reality

I have never been a big believer in fresh starts.

Not because I am cynical about change — I have seen too much of it, in myself and in the people I work with, to dismiss the possibility. But the mythology of the fresh start — the clean slate, the new beginning untethered from everything that came before it — has always seemed off to me. You do not get to start over. You get to start from where you are. Those are two different things.

And yet. Spring keeps arriving anyway, and I keep being unable to argue my way out of it.

What Easter Actually Teaches

The older I get, and the more I have been through, the more I think Easter is about something harder and more honest than renewal. It is about what comes after the worst thing. It is about the possibility — not the guarantee, but the possibility — that the story is not over when it feels like it is.

I sat through a lot of dark mornings during chemo wondering if the things I cared about would still be waiting on the other side. The training. The work. The people. Most of them were. Some of them were different. I was different. That is not a failure of renewal — that is what renewal actually looks like. Not a return to what was, but an honest reckoning with what is, and a decision to keep moving anyway.

The Problem With Fresh Starts

Most people do not need a fresh start. They need an honest look at where they actually are — not where they wish they were, not where they were before things got hard — and a decision about what to do from that specific place, on this specific day, with what is actually available to them.

Spring does not erase winter. It follows it. The ground is softer after the freeze. Things grow anew in the disruption the cold left behind. The season does not pretend nothing happened. It simply keeps going anyway.

That is the version of renewal I embrace. Not the mythology of the blank slate, but the reality of the thawed ground — still marked by what it has been through, and because of that, more ready to grow than it would have been otherwise.

What I Am Actually Starting This Spring

I am getting back into full training mode after a winter where I kept my stride but didn’t go all out. I am putting work into the world that has been in progress for longer than I care to admit. I am trying to show up better in a few places where I know I have been running on autopilot.

None of those things are fresh starts. They are continuations of work already in progress, of commitments already made, of a life that has been through enough to know that the goal is not to start over. The goal is to keep going with more honesty, authenticity and intention than you managed yesterday.

That is what spring is, if you let it be.

Happy Easter. Get outside. Keep going.