Dating : Watching the seasons change helped me through my break up

How the pandemic refocused my attention on the cycles of nature and provided a welcome distraction from negative thoughts.

In March we were blindsided by the pandemic, with its various lockdowns, restrictions and anxieties. Luckily, my work was unaffected and could be transitioned smoothly to relative safety of my spare room. Remote working started in earnest as I settled into the new normal.

In May however, my two-year live-in relationship abruptly came to an end. My partner left and after that excruciating day when he moved his belongings out of our flat, I never heard from him again. I was alone and the country (as well as most of the world) was locked down.

I was scared at first. Not of being alone, but I was afraid of my mind and what the heady mix of heartbreak and lockdown could potentially do to it. I didn’t know how I would cope with swathes of time spent completely isolated. I wasn’t sure how I would process my sorrow in this foreign situation. I’d suffered from spells of both depression and anxiety before, and they’d came out of nowhere. I was unsure how my already patchwork mental wellbeing would hold up during such uncertain times.

Weekdays had routine. My job was busier than ever. I had my daily walk to the park. But the weekends lay ahead unplanned and unstructured. I approached each one with trepidation. I spent a fortune on books from Amazon, built a schedule of films and TV shows that I wanted to watch, planned my Saturday night takeaway.

Weeks passed. I marvelled at things that previously I might not have given a second thought to — the way my local park slipped effortlessly from spring into summer, the tiny little birds that occupied the hedge outside my window, making supper with the radio on and a glass of red wine. I felt, frequently, like books were appearing in my life by some preternatural force. I kept stumbling upon read after read that brought me new perspective on my situation and myself. I absorbed every word. It was like that saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Every recommendation filled me renewed purpose and gave me a positive takeaway.

I had low days of course. I had negative spirals where I ruminated constantly on why the breakup had happened, the questions I so badly wanted clarity on and why I hadn’t been good enough. Living alone and having limited contact with others meant that I had to find ways to pull myself out of these cycles. I could see how damaging they were if left unchecked, in any environment, but particularly in the situation we were in at the time. I read The Untethered Soul (another book that landed in my lap with surreptitiously good timing) with its central theme that you are not your thoughts, you are the one that hears them. This helped me create distance between my inner self and the negative thoughts running through my head. Yes, they were there, but I started to learn to let them pass through without paying much attention to them and certainly without acting upon them. This isn’t as easy as I just made it sound! It takes conscious, consistent effort not to get sucked into these thought patterns. The principals of mindfulness helped here — moving away from my abstract thoughts to something concrete (for example naming five things I could see, smell, hear) and I found that getting out for a walk (yes, in that same park) was particularly soothing.

Nature and walking played a huge part in my new existence. I felt connected to nature. I’d always enjoyed being outside, but this way completely new. It was spiritual. Being near to trees and grass and flowers made me feel more alive than ever. It took me out of my head and activated my senses. Watching the seasons progress felt like a blessing that I had never appreciated before. Walking in the rain felt as wonderful as sitting in radiant sunshine. Everything was imbued with a new magic. A leaf slowing drifting from the tree, the morning light racing across the grass, the tang of earth after heavy rain. These things had always been there, but in 2020 they had my full attention.

This renewed awareness of nature took my focus away from the breakup. It showed me that the world went on turning and that all things were cyclical. Nothing lasted forever, flowers bloomed then shrivelled away, vibrant leafy trees became twigs, the light died in the early winter afternoons. In previous years this might have lowered my spirits and we were going into an uncertain winter with a pandemic still at large. But having watched a blossoming spring, a vivid summer and a crisp golden autumn already in 2020, I welcomed the winter months. Because to experience those other wonderful seasons, nature needed to shed its colour and go in on itself. Because we can’t have those vibrant times, without having the frost and the dark and the barren.

I started to recognise that, like nature, we too go through seasons when it comes to wellbeing. There are times where we need to pare back and store up reserves for ourselves. There will be fallow seasons and some things (like relationships) won’t survive the frost. Nothing lasts forever. Good times and sunshine can’t roll on endlessly. We need the contrast of darkness to appreciate all that is wonderful about the light. I had been clinging to a relationship that offered me little nourishment, because I was avoiding my own stark winter. But when that winter came, I found that it wasn’t cold and lonely. The warmth of rediscovering my own company was more comfort than the chill of trying to make someone happy who didn’t want me.

The fear I’d had for my fragile mental health turned out to be unfounded. The stitches holding together the patchwork blanket of coping mechanisms I had built over the years turned out to be much tougher than I’d anticipated.

It feels almost shameful to make a positive out of the vast negative that has been 2020. But for me, rediscovering nature has showed me that beautiful things grow from the darkest of times. Without the distraction of our usual everyday life, it seems as though everyone has become more attuned to the passing of the seasons. This has given me courage for dark times. I needed my own winter solstice, my own longest night, to realise that nature continues to thrive regardless of whatever happens in the world and we should look to this, the continual passage of growth and death and blossom and fall, to understand our own needs better.