The Spring Dichotomy.

This coming spring will be my fifteenth living in this house. Every year I watch the garden plants display their regeneration in regulation order – first the fading snowdrops hanging over from winter, then the crocuses and primroses, then the daffodils and newly leafing bluebells, and so on and so forth. And every year I wonder how I should respond to this process, since it is but a visual expression of a never ending cycle.

It depends on my mood, of course, but the question remains: should I see it as an optimistic expression of timelessness, or a reminder of the grinding, inescapable tyranny of time? I suppose the first is the more positive reaction, and maybe the correct one in the final, deeper analysis. But in terms of this life alone as an individualised being, the second – much as I regret it – has to be the more realistic.