I spent most of my twenties believing that purpose was something you found once and then held onto.

A winning lottery ticket you kept in your wallet forever.

The self-help industry reinforced this: find your passion. Discover your why. Land on the thing that makes you leap out of bed every morning and then, presumably, keep leaping until you die.

Nobody ever mentioned that some mornings I might not feel like leaping at all, and that this would be fine, even normal, even healthy.

The idea of seasonality shows up in every religious tradition, every folk wisdom corpus, every grandmother's hand-me-down advice, emblazoned on a hundred hallmark greeting cards - and yet we somehow keep forgetting it applies to us.

We accept that crops grow and then get harvested and then the field lies fallow.

We accept that animals hibernate.

We accept that the world needs rest periods built into its operating system.

But when it comes to our own sense of meaning and purpose, our work, our lives, we expect constant summer.

Anything less feels like failure.

I've noticed, looking back over the past decade, that my periods of intense creative output followed a pattern I couldn't see while I was inside them.

There were stretches where I wrote feverishly, where ideas connected to other ideas in chains that felt almost involuntary, where I would wake up at 4 AM with sentences already forming, where (simply put) the work felt effortless.

And then there were long months where I would sit at my desk and feel nothing.

I assumed something had broken. I tried to fix it. I read books about productivity. I adjusted my routines. I wondered if I had permanently lost access to whatever had driven me.

What I failed to notice: that the fallow periods were doing something too. They were composting. I was taking in books and conversations and experiences without the pressure to immediately metabolize them into output. I was wandering without a map, which meant I sometimes stumbled into territory I never would have found if I'd been navigating by GPS.

The harvest seasons, when they returned, drew on seeds I hadn't remembered planting.

There's something cruel in how our culture treats the in-between times. We have words for achievement and words for burnout, but we lack vocabulary for the necessary pauses that precede new growth. If you tell someone you're "taking a break," they hear that you're recovering from something bad. If you say you're "between projects," they assume you've been cast aside. The idea that you might be in a natural winter, that you might be dormant in a way that's preparatory rather than pathological, doesn't compute for most people.

I think part of the problem is that we've internalized an industrial model of human output. Factories don't have seasons. They run continuously, and when they stop, something has gone wrong. We've mapped this onto ourselves without asking whether the analogy holds.

But humans are not factories.

We are, as obvious as this may seem, organisms.

And organisms live through cycles.

I've started asking people about their seasons, and the responses are illuminating. Almost everyone recognizes the pattern once you name it. Almost everyone has experienced multiple cycles of engagement and withdrawal, of burning purpose and comfortable drift. And almost everyone has interpreted at least one of their fallow periods as evidence of something being wrong with them specifically, rather than as a feature of how human lives actually work.

You can look at a calendar and know roughly when winter will arrive. Human seasons are messier.

Sometimes summer lasts three years.

Sometimes winter arrives without warning in the middle of what you thought was spring.

Or in the middle of the night.

Sometimes you're in winter for one domain of your life and summer for another simultaneously, which creates its own kind of confusion.

But the unpredictability doesn't invalidate the pattern. It just means you have to pay attention to your own internal weather instead of relying on external schedules. There are signs, if you're watching for them. A creeping restlessness that suggests you're ready to plant something new. A bone-deep fatigue that suggests you need to stop harvesting and let the field recover.

The self-help industry will keep telling you to find your passion and hold onto it. The productivity gurus will keep implying that consistent output is the hallmark of a well-lived life. And every winter, when your sense of purpose goes quiet, you'll be tempted to believe that you've done something wrong.

You haven't. You're just in a season. Don't try to force a harvest when the ground is asking you to rest.

I have been through winters before and I have always, eventually, found my way back to spring. The springs didn't come because I forced them or fixed myself or followed a twelve-step program. They came because seasons end. They came because the resting period did its hidden work. They came because, whether I knew it or not, I was gathering in the dark.