The two most expensive words in the language
My grandmother said next year about the same trip for eleven years. The trip was to a village two hundred kilometres away where she had been a girl, and where, she said, there was a particular kind of blossom in April that did not grow anywhere else. Next year, when the weather is better. Next year, when my hip is sorted. Next year, when there is less going on.
She died in February. There was, as it turned out, no shortage of springs. There was only a shortage of the ones she was still in.
A life is about eighty springs
This is the part that people find hard to hold in their heads, so it helps to say it in the smallest possible way. If you live to eighty, you get eighty springs. You were too young to notice the first five or six. So call it seventy-four that you actually experience as a person.
If you are thirty-five, you have around forty-five left. Forty-five is not an abstraction. It is roughly the number of people at a wedding. You could write them on a single sheet of paper with room to spare.
The same is true of every seasonal thing you love. Forty-five more first warm days. Forty-five more times the light changes in late August and you feel that specific unnamed feeling. If you are sixty, it is twenty. Twenty is a small enough number that you should probably be looking at the tree in your street more carefully than you currently do.
Why next year feels free
The phrase does not feel like a cost when you say it. That is its whole trick. Saying next year feels like preserving an option, like putting something safely on a shelf. It feels responsible.
What is actually happening is that you are spending one of a countable number of units on not doing the thing, and you never see the bill, because the unit does not vanish in a way you can observe. The spring still arrives. You still see blossom somewhere, from a car window, on the way to something else. It just was not the one you meant.
Most regrets are not built out of dramatic mistakes. They are built out of this, repeated: a small, reasonable, entirely defensible postponement, made forty times in a row, by a person who had every intention of getting to it.
The things that only happen in one season
It is worth making the list, because it is shorter than you think. Blossom is three weeks. The specific week the leaves turn where you live is one week. The light on a particular hillside at a particular time of evening might be ten days a year.
Most of what we plan our lives around is available all the time — restaurants, films, work, arguments online. The seasonal things are the only appointments the year actually keeps, and they are the ones we routinely skip, because they do not send a reminder and nobody is expecting us.
The fix is embarrassingly mechanical. Put them in the calendar. Not as an aspiration; as an event, with a date, the way you would a dentist appointment. Second week of April: go to the park with the trees. Late October: the drive with the hills. It feels absurd to schedule a feeling. It works anyway, because the alternative is another year of meaning to.
Thirty is not early
There is a comfortable belief among people in their twenties and thirties that the accounting starts later — that this is the period for building, and the noticing comes afterwards, once things are established.
I held that belief. What I would say to anyone holding it now is that the establishing does not end. There is no year in which the building is finished and the noticing begins. Work expands, obligations multiply, people get sick, and the capacity you are saving for later gets spent as fast as it arrives. The forty-five springs you have at thirty-five are not going to be quieter than this one.
Which means the habit of going outside at the right week of the year is not something you adopt when life calms down. It is something you do badly, in a rush, in the middle of a busy period, or you do not do at all.
Take the trip
Count your springs. It takes ten seconds and the number will be smaller than you expect, in a way you will feel somewhere below the ribs.
Then take one thing off your next year list and put it on this year's. Not the whole list. One thing, the one that came to mind while you were reading this, that you have now said next year about at least three times.
I went to my grandmother's village, eventually. The blossom is ordinary. It is the same blossom as everywhere else, and it lasts about ten days, and standing under it I understood that she had never been describing a tree. She had been describing being nineteen. That trip was never going to work in April of any year, because the destination had closed decades before.
Some things really do only exist in the version of the year you were in when you first meant to go. Most things do not. Most things are still standing, three hundred kilometres away, waiting for a weekend you have not committed to.