I’m sitting at my dining room table with a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle spread in front of me, and I’m resisting the urge to check my email or Instagram for the fifteenth time today.
Puzzles are never just puzzles for me. I reach for them when my mind is too noisy and my intuition too quiet. Sorting through scattered pieces quiets the constant chatter just enough for another part of me to begin paying attention.
Right now, I know I’ve got some big changes coming. I can feel them long before I can see them. They’re not fully formed yet, and they aren’t ready for action, but they’re there, just beneath the surface.
The problem is that I don’t particularly enjoy this part.
I’m in a fallow period. And honestly? I keep pushing against it.
I can settle into the quiet for a little while. A weekend without plans or an afternoon with a puzzle and a good cup of tea feels restorative.
But when the stillness stretches on, something in me starts pushing back.
I tend to be a doer with some mandatory rest built in, so I don’t completely fizzle out. But fallow isn’t just rest, it’s emptiness before fullness. It’s the uncomfortable space of not knowing what’s next.
My monkey mind has plenty to say about that.
“You’re wasting time.”
“You should at least be planning the next thing.”
“Everyone else seems to know where they’re going.”
“This is just procrastination dressed up as self-care.”
It’s amazing how convincing those voices can sound.
This internal noise minimizes the profound importance of fallow time. But here’s what I’ve learned over the years: the quality of your spring planting depends entirely on the depth of your winter rest.
We’re not machines designed for constant productivity. We’re humans designed to move through natural cycles of growth and rest, action and integration.
Over the years, though, I’ve started to notice that life has its own rhythms, whether I cooperate with them or not.
Nature never questions winter.
The trees don’t apologize for standing bare.
The soil doesn’t rush seeds to sprout before they’re ready.
Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that every season of our lives should look like spring or summer, full of growth, productivity, and visible progress.
We’ve lost respect for winter.
I’ve come to think of life as cycling through four seasons.
There are times for planting, when fresh ideas arrive and possibility feels almost electric, a spring season. The summer season of tending, when consistency matters far more than excitement. The fall season brings completion, satisfaction, and the chance to recognize how far we’ve come.
And then there is winter.
The fallow season.
The season most of us try hardest to escape.
From the outside, fallow can look like nothing is happening. A project pauses. A relationship ends. Retirement begins. Children leave home. Healing takes longer than expected. We find ourselves between identities, between dreams, or simply between the person we’ve been and the person we’re becoming.
But beneath the surface, something essential is happening.
Some of our best insights emerge during periods when we’re not actively trying to solve a problem. The brain continues making connections behind the scenes, integrating experiences and reorganizing information while we think we’re “doing nothing.”
I’ve certainly noticed that’s true in my own life.
The times when I’ve tried hardest to force clarity have rarely produced it.
The times when I’ve stepped away, taken a walk on the beach, worked on a puzzle, or simply allowed myself to be still are often when the next step quietly appears.
I’m beginning to think that one of the gifts of getting older is that my body no longer lets me skip this season.
When I was younger, I could override the signals. I could push through uncertainty, ignore exhaustion, and convince myself that more effort was always the answer.
I don’t seem to have that luxury anymore.
My body has become a much more honest messenger.
When I ignore the need to rest, it lets me know.
When I try to rush clarity, I become restless instead of productive.
When I resist the season I’m actually in, I spend far more energy fighting reality than I would by simply accepting it.
I used to think resilience meant pushing through.
I’m beginning to think resilience is learning to listen sooner.
That doesn’t mean I enjoy fallow.
I still want to know what’s next.
I still catch myself trying to hurry the process.
But I’m slowly learning that the quality of what grows next depends on the richness of the soil it’s growing from.
And rich soil isn’t created during harvest.
It’s created during the quiet seasons that look, from the outside, like nothing much is happening at all.
Most of us are in different seasons in different areas of life simultaneously. And that’s perfectly normal, and exhausting.
Recognizing and being gentle with ourselves can help us navigate through each experience more consciously and with more ease.
As I write this, the puzzle is still spread across my dining room table.
There are clusters of pieces that clearly belong together and large empty spaces where I still can’t see the picture. Every now and then I’ll pick up a piece that seems completely unrelated, only to discover it fits perfectly somewhere I hadn’t considered.
Life has felt a little like that lately.
I don’t have all the pieces yet. I don’t know exactly what this next season will look like. But after enough years, I’ve learned that forcing pieces together rarely creates the picture I’m hoping for.
Some things can only be recognized when enough of the landscape has quietly emerged.
Maybe that’s the real invitation of a fallow season, even as we keep living our lives and dreaming our dreams, leaning into the uncertainty of what’s next, trusting that something important is still taking shape, even when you can’t yet see the whole picture.
So this afternoon, I’ll make another cup of cinnamon cardamom tea and place another handful of puzzle pieces.
Sometimes the slow work is the real work.
The puzzle will be finished when it’s finished.
Spring, summer and fall will arrive when they’re ready.
Until then, I’m learning to trust the season I’m in instead of wishing I were somewhere else.
How about you?
What season are you finding yourself in right now? And perhaps an even gentler question: what would change if you stopped fighting it?
Hit reply and tell me. I’m genuinely curious what season you’re navigating, and whether you’re resisting it or embracing it.
(And if you’re in fallow like me, know you’re not alone in finding it uncomfortable.)
originally posted: https://open.substack.com/pub/cathygattobrennan/p/the-season-we-keep-trying-to-skip?r=4zakz&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web