The Truth of Spring

It takes time for things to come out of nowhere

I left on a Tuesday to head to San Franciso for a work conference, and there were no flowers in sight. I came back on a Saturday morning to find all the trees on my street and at work were in full bloom.

And just like that, spring has popped up in Seattle.

Except, that’s not really how it happens. It can be deceiving to see how quickly the flowers go from bare to full bloom, to think that it all happened magically and suddenly. But trees must do a lot of work and preparation in their dormant seasons to prepare for the vibrant blooms of spring.

To prepare for blooms, trees and other plants undergo a complex process of vernalization. Vernalization is a process in which plants are exposed to cold temperatures to trigger flowering. So, it’s the winter season that allows spring to be as glorious as it is. And a lot of work is happening behind the scenes in winter to prepare for the “suddenness” of spring.

There is a myriad of other processes too, but all of this is to say that spring rarely comes out of nowhere. It is hard earned through long slogs of winter, rest, and work cycles.

The trees are gloriously in full bloom on Fred Hutch’s campus.

People’s “springs” take a lot of work too

This same process applies to our own lives. We might look around and see the people in our lives, or those we follow on social media, suddenly “blooming”. It can make the slog of doing our own good work seem tiresome and pointless. But the truth is that almost every time, those individuals got to that point through a lot of slogging, a lot of proverbial “wintering” and hard seasons.

I try to remember this constantly in my own work. As a researcher, I probably could not have picked a slower industry in which to exist. The pace of research is painstakingly slow, discoveries require a lot of failure, and the path to support this work was already narrow but narrowing rapidly with continued funding cuts. It’s hard to keep stepping one foot in front of the other in hopes that you land somewhere good.

But I keep coming back to the fact that tiny steps of work, of enduring the colder seasons, can lead to blooms you aren’t expecting.

A workshop for HOPE

I, along with my incredible team, just launched our first workshop for an intervention called HOPE. HOPE focuses on supporting women with recurrent ovarian cancer, which is often a challenging prognosis and illness journey. It pulls from the science around the power of storytelling, coping strategies and present mindedness, and community and social support to help women cope and dare I say thrive with the right now reality of their situation. Its goal is to find ways to help women with recurrent ovarian cancer thrive, even when their circumstances may be telling them it’s not possible to thrive here.

When I look back, I realize my partner Robyn Castellani (whose Substack “A Field Guide to Flourishing” I highly recommend) started to have conversations dreaming up this workshop all the way back in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Back then, I was squished in a tiny apartment in New York City, with a 2-year-old and a new baby. With the pain and struggle that COVID-19 brought, I found myself reconsidering my own work. I began asking, “What would it look like to design an intervention that people really wanted to sign up for?”

But even the HOPE workshop was an off shoot of an idea born out of the “Evolution of Hope in Advanced Illness” round table event at Harvard that I, along with my wonderful colleagues, hosted to begin reimagining what hope could look like for patients facing an advanced illness diagnosis.

Our field is so centrally focused on cure at all costs that we often forget how to help the human side of our patients thrive. To find hope, joy, and love even during a hard diagnosis. I remember being astounded at the turnout from leaders in the field for this round table. We had hit on a nerve, a major need in this community. And I have seen that nerve pulse more strongly in recent years.

All this is to say, the launch of the HOPE workshop is truly a miracle. It’s a miracle that it happened. It’s a miracle that people like Robyn stayed with it long enough to see it through (most people can’t tolerate the speed of research!). It’s a miracle that other incredible people on my team came alongside and made it better.

And it was worth it.

It’s still very small. It’s just a handful of workshops, and I don’t know where it’s going. But what I do know is that this first workshop was beyond what I could have hoped or imagined, all because the patients involved are incredible humans with so much grace, bravery, and goodness. And they showed up for each other, gave it a try, and created something beautiful.

Like the flowers of spring, this workshop sort of eventually just “popped up”. But the truth is, it took years and year and years to get here.

Where is your tree preparing for flowering?

This week’s newsletter is a direct encouragement to say, “Keep doing the good thing you are doing” or “Start the good thing you want to start.” It might be a small monthly get together with people on your block, a book club with people in your life you want to get to know better, a mom’s playdate for a chance to connect, afternoon tea with your retired neighbors.

Just like I did, ask yourself: “What’s something good I could create that might make a little difference somewhere?” It doesn’t need to be huge, and you can take years to get there. But that’s the only way to bloom. There’s no fast pass.

And if you’ve ever experienced true spring, you know it will eventually be worth it.

*If you find this newsletter helpful, please forward to someone you think would benefit. I’d love to grow the Light in the Wound community.