Lessons From Springtime: Don’t Rush the Process

By Emily Phifer, AMFT

 

Life Unfolds

Every Spring we get an immersive sensory experience in seeing life emerging and blossoming all around us. Trees and plants develop buds and fragrant blooms, baby birds hatch from fragile eggs in nests. Caterpillars eat their fill, growing to capacity and then undergoing their cocoon journeys of transformation in becoming butterflies to grace our skies. There’s something inherently encouraging about seeing life around us forming and flourishing in nature. If natural life can unfold and become beautiful in its own time and process around us, perhaps this same kind of hopeful unfolding and emerging can happen within and through us as humans as well. We can touch, feel, see and smell life happening around us. But can we so easily and tangibly sense and make way for growth inside of ourselves? 

 

Mystery of Metamorphosis

Nature unapologetically takes its time to cycle through the seasons, develop new life, and emerge as it is meant to. We observe with wonder as birds painstakingly make their nests- gathering twigs, hairs, grasses, and feathers to create a home in which to nurture eggs into baby birds. No amount of wishing or hoping on our part can speed up the process of the caterpillar’s journey into becoming a butterfly. We watch, we hope and we wait- curious at the mystery of what transpires within the cocoon to bring forth a beautiful new creature in flight. We have a certain grace for nature’s process because it is out of our control- it is outside of us, and something mysterious to behold.

 

Growth Takes Time

But do we have as much grace and patience for our own development and growth as humans? We don’t force rosebuds to open and become fragrant, and yet we often lose patience with ourselves in the process of our own blossoming and becoming. We easily forget that healing takes time and growth can’t be forced. Nature requires the right conditions to nurture growth and fruition to take place. It takes time and space within the cocoon for the liquified caterpillar to morph into solid wings, legs and antennae. Even after the butterfly emerges, there must be time for the tender new wings to dry before readying to take flight. 

 

Growing Conditions

Take heart in remembering that personal growth takes time, and requires nurturing and supportive conditions. You are surely growing and changing in ways that are important, but may be difficult to see in real time.  Sometimes it helps to slow down and take stock: How are the growing conditions in our lives? How can we make way for spring and new life to emerge within and through us?

 

Consider Your “Growing Grounds”

What elements do you need to help nourish your development as a person?

Who and what in your life helps to support your growth?

What might be hindering you from taking first steps towards changes you’d like to make? 

Get support to explore your growth edges, and be willing to take some risks.

Be as gentle and nonjudgmental as you can with yourself as you lean into new possibilities.

Remember: Growth takes time! Don’t rush the process.