On Spring

 Spring is here!… though you can't alway trust it. There are times when this time of year have brought as much snow as flowers.

However, this year I have seen some spring. I have seen blue skies, I have felt the sun on my face and I have smiled at many nodding daffodils and sighed at delicate blossoms. Last week I went to a farm with my two-year old niece, we looked at Highland Cows basking in the sun and she peered at the blossoms and told me about the “pretty daffodils”. She played the shadow game, stepping on our shadows and telling us she’d done so, looking perplexed at not being able to see hers, trying to get it to go ahead of her. 

One of my favourite Johnson essays is Rambler 5, written in 1750 and now called ‘A meditation on the spring’. As he says, “There is, indeed, something inexpressibly pleasing in the annual renovation of the world”. He talks about a man who manages to make himself happy for most of the year by declaring everything to come right in the spring. As such, he always has something to look forward to in the dead of winter and something to hold onto as the summer blasts the grass and the autumn approaches. 

He talks about how some people can’t enjoy the simple pleasures of the season, and what a shame that is. He encourages everyone to open their eyes to natural pleasure, to look at the flowers, shades of green, to watch the birds - as such an attention “multiplies the inlets to happiness”. It’s a fantastic phrase and one I want to hold onto. I love how he doesn’t describe them as sources of happiness, but inlets - happiness is not certain, but if I person opens up as many little gaps for it to enter, it’s more likely to come in.

Today I accompanied schoolchildren to a zoo. I’m always a little mixed on zoos, I don’t even have any pets because I don’t feel an animal deserves to be locked up with me, so seeing something as majestic as a tiger in a small enclosure being gawped by over-excited 8 year-olds alerts something uncomfortable in me. At the same time, many of the species in the zoo were highly endangered (the crocodiles there belonged to a species with only 500 in the wild), and they did provide a sense of joy, and even awe in the children looking at them, and in me. Yet the animal that most fascinated many of them? A black ladybird with red spots that flew onto my jacket. I suppose they expected to see a tiger, but not a black ladybird.

We do live in an incredible world, and sometimes that can be forgotten in our human-centred world with our human-centred problems. Sometimes he need to be amazed at the black ladybird, and multiply the inlets of happiness.