Keeping the seasonal spirit alive
October 21, 2020
The season of fall always lets you know when it has arrived. The wind smells crisp and flavorful. The trees begin to yellow and a gentle cascade of leaves sprinkles the ground.
Suddenly, the sun doesn’t beat down so hard on your neck and a wonderful period of rain serves as the perfect transition into chillier weather.
Fall is my favorite season for reasons beyond that. Besides turning one year older, it reminds me of late nights with my friends, with no expectations for what the evening will bring us except for joy and entertainment. It reminds me of being 10 years old again, running through pumpkin patches with my friends and playing outside until our shoes were worn and our feet sore.
It reminds me of my grandma coming to visit, settling into a rhythm in The Sidekick as well as theater and watching everyone around me embrace the sweater weather.
Fall is just perfect. There is no changing my mind about that.
But you can’t really do anything this year without mentioning COVID-19. It has taken away a lot of those seasonal joys and special annual moments in general. My favorite season is going to be watered down to the pandemic version of it, just like everything else. I should be bummed about it. Everyone else is.
But I’m not, and I refuse to be.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being sad about everything all the time. I’m not saying that fall automatically eradicates the virus, but it can be an opportunity to eliminate the constant pessimistic view we have learned to take since early March.
I hear a lot of talk about how 2020 is the worst year ever, and while it is unfortunate that so many dreary events were crammed into one year, that doesn’t mean we need to surrender to that mindset. If COVID-19 stole so much from us, would it not make more sense to steal the end of the year back and enjoy it to the fullest?
While I love my generation, I find that a big component of what makes our generational culture unique is that drive for wanting to be as gloomy about everything as possible. We’re a “cup half empty” kind of group.
Since a lot of my life has been transferred to pixels on a screen because there is little else to occupy my time, I unwittingly participated in that insistence on being sad. With the world in the state that it’s in, we can’t be dragging ourselves down. It has taken me embarrassingly long to realize how much that was holding me back.
But no longer.
Our efforts are better spent on making this the best last three months of the year than already predicting that it will get worse. Put the phone down and go outside. Pick a pumpkin at a pumpkin patch. Have a socially distanced picnic with your friends. Play some holiday music and boogie until you’re out of breath. There is a middle ground between enjoying yourself and staying safe in a pandemic.
The best time of the year is upon us. Let’s act like it.
Follow Camila Villarreal (@fliipthewriter) and @CHSCampusNews on Twitter.
