The manual of human weather

In dusty albums and on trembling branches, time plays the same sleight of hand. Moments curl and colour before you can catch them, like leaves in fall. I used to believe seasons were nature's way of practicing transformation. I was wrong.

Nature and humans mastered the art of metamorphosis long before we learned to count rings in trees or wrinkles in mirrors.

Seasons don't just change – they dissolve into each other like watercolours bleeding across wet paper. Summer doesn't end; it slowly surrenders its greens to autumn's golds, like we surrender our certainty of youth, one conviction at a time. Winter doesn't arrive; it seeps through the spaces between falling leaves, much like how wisdom creeps into our bones through every fracture we heal.

I remember the day I noticed a season changing. Not the gradual shift we all notice in mirrors and photographs, but the actual moment of change. It was late September, and there was a single maple leaf, still green at its stem but blazing red at its tips, as if it had dipped its toes in autumn to get a tinge of its colour. The leaf trembled once, twice, then let go of its branch with the grace of a ballet dancer taking a final bow. As it spiralled down, it was as if it had painted the air with stories of summer storms and midnight whispers, of bird songs and thunder.

My springs were filled with skinned knees and new discoveries, each day a fresh page waiting to be written. Of broken promises, and dreams that changed shape like clouds.I grew like wild strawberries, fierce and sweet, reaching toward sun-filled possibilities. Spring taught me hope – how to push through the soil of doubt toward light, how to unfurl new leaves after frost has kissed the old ones goodbye.

Summer stretched endless in my twenties, golden with invincibility. I ran through those years like a child through sprinklers, each droplet a possibility, each moment eternal until it wasn't. I cherished every moment with summer's intensity, burned with its passion and believed in its endless light. But like all summers, mine held the seeds of autumn in its ripest fruits.

Autumn crept in once those early years had passed, painting my certainties in subtler shades. I learned to appreciate the beauty of letting go – of beliefs that no longer served, of relationships that had completed their seasons, of the person I thought I would become. Like leaves turning colour, these moments created both death and art, loss and revelation.

It taught me to appreciate the coming winter's wisdom, finding beauty in barren branches and meaning in empty spaces. There's a different kind of growth in winter – the kind that happens beneath the surface, in root and heartwood. I've realised that winter isn't an ending but a pause between stories, a blank page between chapters.

I've learned to watch for these moments of surrender in both nature and humanity. They're everywhere. In the way the morning frost melts under the spring sun, each crystal becoming a drop of possibility, like how old wounds dissolve under the warmth of newfound purpose. The way summer afternoons stretch like cats in sunbeams, lazy and golden and endless until they're not – much like our own seasons of abundance and certainty, seeming infinite until autumn whispers its first warning.

We are spring when we dare to begin again, summer when we burn with purpose, autumn when we learn the art of graceful release, and winter when we finally understand the beauty of rest and renewal. Each season of life bleeds into the next, carrying forward traces of what came before, like tree rings recording the history of drought and rain.

The truth is, seasons don't just change – they dance, they whisper, they tell stories. Sometimes, late at night, I hear them: the soft rustling of seasons shifting in their sleep, each one carrying a fragment of time's endless cycle. They gather in pools of memory. I hear them in the blink of my eyelids, in the silence of rooms that once burst with different dreams. Each season leaves its mark – a scar here, a laugh line there, a certain softness around the edges of once-sharp certainties.

We change like seasons because we are seasons – brief, beautiful cycles in the history of human existence. Each phase carries its own wisdom, its own particular light. And in the end, we learn that transformation isn't something that happens to us – We change, yes, but only so we can remain the same, transformed yet eternal, ready to tell our stories to those who know how to read the language of passing time in both the sky above and the heart within.

I write ‘cos words are fun. More about me here. Follow @hackrlife on X or subscribe to my blog