I noticed something while heading into work earlier today: something to do with the temperature of the air as I wandered on into the warehouse for another night of "fighting boxes". Yesterday, the temperature had climbed into the 70s before plummeting back down into the high 30s overnight. I saw this coming, as I always check the weather before work. I find it useful to know what the weather will be preceding every shift, that way I know how many layers to bring along if needed. Either way, a feeling struck me as I was walking through the cool air of the warehouse. I felt like it was Fall again. I had just gone from feeling the warmth of a late-Spring day to the dry, windy air of night: much like the transition from Summer to Fall. With that, a whole host of sensations and memories emerged. This is where the tangent of personal tales begins.
I recall Fall when I was young. Back when I lived in the countryside of Tennessee, Fall was quite the sight to behold. The tree-adorned hills would glow in the colors of Autumn: a sea of light's warmest colors. In the winds which billowed through the branches of those trees, the leaves would fall and dance like curtains of rain. Whirls of leaves would frolic just above the ground from time to time, though they remained a rare sight for my sore eyes. It was still warm enough to play outside comfortably with fewer layers in many cases, but the cold would envelop the land slowly with the falling of night. Bound to its region, time, and point of experience, this was Fall as I knew it in my memories. Perhaps some of you are familiar with this iteration of the season: some of you may not be. The seasons express themselves in a variety of ways across the world. This is simply how I knew them in the region of Earth which raised me.
And so it was, but it no longer is. The seasons do not change with the same grace as I once knew when I was younger. Even my family, through their ignorance of the climate at large, noticed how the seasons did not act how they used to in our region: late Summer came with great droughts, the dehydrated trees gave only dull leaves, and later rain would strip them bare. Despite being the "weather-head" of the family, who knew full well that the climate was expressing itself this way due to a variety of factors (Humanity being an obvious one), none of them would listen to me. Part of the reason I'm even writing this is due to me noticing the difficulty nature is having switching her gears from Winter to Spring. It feels more and more like the transitional seasons of Spring and Fall have become less and less pronounced in favor of the extremes found in Summer and Winter.
I'm sure you have memories that are easily triggered by particular things: a smell, taste, sound, song, place, object, ect. This is quite common for me through scents, like many, but it also occurs in ways so subtle I have yet to entirely pin them down. The changing of seasons is another such case. Although I didn't experience seasonal depression in the Winter for much of my life, I would eventually come to understand it after moving to the Midwest. The Winters here are bitter and cruel. In the barren landscapes of ice and snow I can feel the collective suffering and death of countless creatures across time: the mass dying of insects no longer playing their roles amongst the plants, the grass and plants as well, the many other creatures who freeze and starve across the land. For many, this is truly nature at her most passively bitter; for many, this is nature's most basic filter.
But for those of us who have surpassed this filter well enough, it is important to understand that we have internalized it. This is why such a seasonal depression can occur in the first place. The only way for a species to react to a circumstance appropriately is if it has encountered it before. Our minds alone can only remember so much, but our bodies and senses can remind us with far greater clarity. Even as I write, sipping on some wine, I remember the many days of the pandemic when I was locked inside with my family and a box of wine in my room. Wine brings me back to that pivotal year of my life of 2021 when so many facets of my identity would be tossed about in the wind like the leaves in the Fall. I recall the friends I both made and lost. The source of these memories arising exists beyond the typical concept of the mind alone.
This brings us back around to when I was entering the warehouse. The circumstances presented to my body led to me feeling like it was Fall once more, all because the weather expressed itself in an unstable manner. I think now about what may happen to people as the climate continues to churn in this chaotic direction. I wonder if perhaps someone reading this has already noticed how the unstable seasons are leading to confusion on a far subtler level than simply not knowing what to wear on a day to day. The time in which I grew up had a collection of seasons which moved and danced far more fluidly than the uncomfortable writhing they do now. All of those formative memories bound to sunny days or snow and ice now timed far more inconsistently with when they are brought up. For those who grow up today, their formative memories of the seasons will be caught up in the current chaos they express, provided they go outside enough to experience it: a separate problem of its own. But who knows if even the seasons they know will remain the same a few decades on from now.
The world which raised Humanity as a whole died long, long ago, and Humans helped it die. There is no moral claim to be made here, though. This is not a matter of right or wrong. The flow of time and change does not abide in Human moral conceptions, but in these harsh transitions, the living memory that is our bodies and nature remember all too well of time(s) we cannot return to. Grasping for a retreating past or trying anxiously to change and determine an undeterminable future will only do so much. I'm not entirely sure why I felt the need to write and share this, but as I worked that night, I felt it important enough to share. I wonder if other people have noticed the subtler effects of the changing climate on their minds and bodies. It is but another pair of jaws the modern world has offered to gnaw at our sanity. The best we can do in the here and now as individuals is to notice this and adapt. It is that very ability which allowed Humanity to get itself into this situation in the first place, and it may be the only thing that permits Humanity to overcome it with any semblance of grace.
