Between Seasons: On Effort and Ease

The mornings have gotten colder here. You can see your breath now. For most, jackets and hoodies seem necessary, unless, of course, you are a middle-schooler.

There’s snow on the mountaintops.

Snow. In September.

I’m still getting used to that.

And yet, as the day lingers on and the layers come off, somehow, late into the afternoon, it’s so warm that summer seems entirely unconcerned with leaving.

It’s strange to feel these extremes in the same day. I haven’t quite figured out how to dress accordingly yet.

I’m genuinely excited for my first Montana winter. The snow. The darkness. The whole lore of it.

I’m just not quite ready for it yet.

Isn’t there supposed to be a fall? An in-between?

Maybe because I’m living in a similar one.
There are signs that things are changing, but I can’t quite see what they’re becoming yet.

And I’m noticing how much I want to know what comes next.

My baseline is pretty action-oriented. Give me a problem and I’ll look for the next step. Something to do. Somewhere to direct my energy. I believe deeply that mood follows action. So much so that I’ve built a movement-based practice around that very idea.

Lately, I’m noticing that when you give me uncertainty, I apparently do the same thing.

I could blame my Virgo nature, but the truth is, there are things that I want right now. Things that I’m working toward. Things I care deeply about. And when I care deeply about something, my instinct is rarely to loosen my grip.

It’s to dig in and do more.

Which is probably why I’ve been thinking so much about letting go. It can be hard to discern when something needs more effort, more time, or a little more space.

When I’m anxious about whether all of my efforts are actually going anywhere, I’m especially vulnerable to the cultural message that the answer is more—more content, more visibility, more effort, more emails.

I feel that pressure too.

I may be a pretty devoted meditator, but I’m also what my meditation teacher calls a householder. I have kids, a career, bills to pay, things I want, things I’m responsible for.

Here I am new to a community and building relationships from the ground up, and some days it’s hard not to look for evidence that something is taking shape. A response. A connection. Some small sign that says, You’re getting somewhere.

There’s something especially hard about the in-between when your instinct is to move things along. To do what you can, and then wait.

Hurry up and wait.

I’ve had to work hard at this. I’m still learning how to be with the waiting.

Because I know there comes a point when effort has to give way to trusting the work already done—trusting that the structures I’ve created can support the movement I’m hoping for.

A reminder: structure supports movement.

Sometimes the work is in creating the conditions. Sometimes it’s in trusting what those conditions can hold.

It’s probably much easier to tell a story about trusting the process once the process has proven itself.

This isn’t that story. At least not yet.

Of course I want all of this doing to lead somewhere.

I want the email returned. The connection made. The next thing to reveal itself.

But the other morning I was reminded what can happen when I loosen my grip a little.

I sat across from someone I had never met before and we talked for over an hour about attachment and motherhood, community and belonging, life transitions, and the work we each care about.

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I stopped thinking about future collaborations or next steps and felt my body sink into the chair.

I was just there.

And when I left, nothing had been decided. Nothing had been promised.

But I felt seen. I felt heard. I felt something real had happened.

In a world increasingly fixated on optimization, outcomes, visibility, performance, and productivity, it can be easy to lose sight of how much that kind of connection matters.

Maybe that’s the ease I’m still learning—not the ease of not caring, but the ease of allowing myself to be met, of actually inhabiting the moment.

Visibility is not the same as being met. And still, we need to make room for both.

The same is true of effort and ease.
The cold mornings and the hot afternoons.

Maybe that’s what the in-between asks of us.

To keep participating.
To keep caring.
To keep doing what is ours to do.

And to recognize the moments when effort can soften into ease.

Maybe that’s why the mornings have been catching my attention. There’s already snow on the mountaintops, even while summer is still hanging around in the afternoons. The season is changing before the landscape looks entirely different.

There are so many moments in our lives that don’t need to become anything more.

Let the conversation be a conversation.
Let the cold morning be a cold morning.

Maybe that’s the practice of the in-between.