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Kristin Haakenson's avatar

My spiritual director once told me that she felt that seasonality was placed in my heart for a reason - my instinct is always to feel that whatever the day gives is permanent. Future rain feels impossible on dry hot days, peace feels impossible on the suffering days. That's where faith, and a faith based in the gift of seasonality, has been the path I have chosen to hold fast to.

I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' Uncle Screwtape:

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before."

"Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship."

"This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns."

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Daniel Joseph Petty's avatar

I’m o a sort of season of sameness at work. I think it feels like something should change because I’ve now been at this job longer than I have any other, and have now had the same position for a few years. It seems like change is imminent but I don’t actually see any change happening. At least not there. But in the past two weeks I have started to use my lunch breaks as writing breaks which has produced some writing I’m proud of already. So some change has come and it’s been very cool. Just mot a change I thought I would see.

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