I’ve been thinking, Spring Break falls so softly onto the calendar. It’s an unobtrusive thing, a widening of the space where your world’s problems and hurry momentarily thin out. The days stretch a little less tight, as if time itself has decided to stretch its own legs out. And in this gradual unfolding, everything we’ve been passing by at an ever-increasing rate of speed starts to make its way back into view. Not dramatically, but as the shy creatures of the forest emerge when the trees fall silent. Half-thoughts, small concerns, ideas that had been hovering around the edges of your attention but never quite managed to make it back into the center, these all begin to make an appearance, curious to know if you’re actually paying attention. There’s something almost sweetly vulnerable in all this noticing.  Step out of your own way for a week, and suddenly your own way looks back at you with a slightly skewed angle of vision. 

That familiar feeling has become a stranger in your own world, but in the gentlest possible way. Questions that have been lingering in the back of your mind for the past several months suddenly make themselves comfortable by your side, and in this moment comes the best time for reflection. Your own habits and routines seem to raise an eyebrow as if they’d been waiting for this exact moment to make their own introduction. 

There’s something like this at the heart of the work we do with The Symbiosis Foundation. There’s something like this in the pauses and the hesitations and the silences. These are the moments that feel like lanterns, small lights that don’t demand your attention but simply offer it. In this offering, just enough is illuminated for you to make out the faint outlines of something that had been lurking just out of sight. Something that hadn’t quite been admitted. Something that’s suddenly and completely unavoidable. The room rearranges itself. The work rearranges itself. The conversation rearranges itself. It feels as if you’re standing in the middle of it all, watching the pieces shift into a new kind of harmony you didn’t realize they were reaching for.

Once this world comes back into view, it stays. It lingers at the edges, nudging the world around you into small, quiet changes. The noise returns as it always does. But you know you have shifted inside. You have a slightly different awareness, a slightly softer focus, a sense that the edges of your world are more alive than you ever realized they might be. Maybe this is what a break is for, as it allows the world to adjust itself slightly so you can see it in a fresh way when you return.