I got my heart broken in the spring. 

For the next few years, somehow I avoided the season entirely. The crazy thing about switching hemispheres (I live in New Zealand) or traveling to the tropics (I’m from Hawaii) is that you can totally miss spring. I mean, I only had my first real “spring” when I moved to New Zealand for university. Before that, daffodils and lilies-of-the-valley were only in Anne of Green Gables or the Narnia series. Spring quickly became my favourite season—come October (I know, this is a real mind-bender if you’re from the Northern Hemisphere), I was a crazed fan following every new flower that bloomed, full of excitement for everything to come.

Until that spring. Yeah, the one where I got my heart broken.

All those pretty little flowers—usually giving me hope—just drove my disappointment deeper.

Oh, I avoided it quickly. I hopped on a plane and within a day I was in dreary autumn with grey skies and dying trees. It was great, especially when I was learning to grieve a whole lot of things. The next few springs I managed to switch hemispheres again or I hung out in the tropics—for those of you raised in endless summer, you know. It’s not all paradise. Never-changing seasons just lull you into thinking you’re “all good”, even if you’re not.

So, I avoided spring, and all that it reminded me of. 

 

Until this spring. The season where I’m more confident of good things coming than I ever have been. This spring, the season that I can finally say I am “okay”—or even better than that. This spring. Not any other one before it.

 

But what do you do when everything around you reminds you of prior pain?

Even the tiniest daffodil could trigger a memory. A lily could remind me of “that one song”. Our brains are annoying like that. They remember. And though I’d like to shut down “negative” memories, you cannot shut down your heart without doing tremendous damage. So, I had to feel it. And cling to the mantra:

This is not that season. 

Over and over again, I swallowed it like the multivitamin I somehow still forget to take:

This is not that season, this is not that time.

Every time, hoping, restoring, trusting again.

Then I’d chew on the words of an old family friend, who said that life is not a straight line, but instead a winding path up a mountain (we have Mount Maunganui to visualise). You circle around and up, and can find yourself in the same forest you thought you just got through. But the reality is—if you look out, you’re much higher than you were before. And you will make it to the top. You will. 

 

I got my heart broken in the spring, but my heart was healed that season, too. 

Well, hasn’t been spring whispering to me all along? After death comes life, after grieving comes joy, and after disappointment—hope.

 

It’s the same for us.

It’s the same for you.

 

“Weeping may last through the night,
but joy comes with the morning.”

-Psalm 30:5 (NLT)