Listen to the commentary

Dear Marketplace Friend,

Last week, I might have poked you in the eye. This was my taunt: Living life to the full means managing the current season while preparing for the next transition. Suitable preparation involves knowing what’s possible tomorrow and taking deliberate actions today to make the best outcomes likely tomorrow. Is it worth the effort to move forward?

If you’re satisfied with your life experience today – on all fronts – and are willing to call it “game over” in the journey toward “life to the full,” you can zone out and get back to scanning your email in-box and checking your texts. Settling is much easier than stretching, but personal progress involves deliberate and determined exception to the pervasive malaise that always surrounds movers.

Seasons are easy to observe and understand in our external world. There is no real surprise in anticipating the unique aspects and opportunities attached to Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. There’s no downside to having a favorite season unless you act as if your preferred period will continue unabated into the future.

Spring is a time of new beginnings. Summer is prime time, using long days to allow strong commitment to immediate growth. Fall is devoted to collecting the returns on the labor expended all Summer. Winter is the time to batten down the hatches, preserve the recent harvest, sharpen the tools and create a game-plan for the relaunch made possible by the return of Spring, and the launch of new – or renewed – pursuits.

The whole of life is similarly seasonal. Moses suggested that a life of 80 years is the prize offered to the strong (Psalm 90:10). Spring – about 20 years – is Youth. Summer – from 20-40 – is Adult I, when the apprenticeship of life and future leadership is in focus. Adult II is the Fall – from 40-60 – when you harvest leadership if not compromised by avoidable crisis during Adult I. Finally, the Winter of life grants Elder status – from 60-80 – to those for whom experience-sourced wisdom gleaned during Adult II makes them essential to the development of those behind them.

For many, life is distracted by unreasonable longings that disallow the opportunity to live the seasons. Youth who want the benefits of Adult I without the responsibilities. Adult II who expect blanket pardons for bad decisions during Adult I and feel entitled to leadership privileges without prior sacrifices. Elders who want to stop the clock and overstay their time in Adult II become problematic.

Life has seasons, but so do each of the strata of life through those periods. Within the vital core of your Personal life, the build-out of body, mind, soul and spirit has seasonal cycles as well. That strata reaches out to affect everything else you have in motion. Managing those vital systems – your physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions – will impact everything else you do or attempt. And each of them has Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter simile.

Your Family life stretches from now until end-of-life, and beyond. Within that Family file is your marital and parental performance. These divinely-designed human relationships are essential for an abundant life, and under attack by the Evil One through the cultural hostility that is attacking monogamous lifetime marriage and the intact nuclear family.

In the work-centered 21^st Century American marketplace, the commercial climate is 24/7. Your Professional life is a two-sided medallion: what you do for money – your Career – is a major battlefront. The flip side – your Resources – considers what you do with money, once in hand. Success and failure ride on those two pursuits; integrity and worldview will drive both. Seasonal? For sure.

Manage the current season; prepare for the next transition. That’s the challenge… or miss the chance to maximize opportunity unique to each season and exploit it effectively while positioning for the inevitably of the next seasonal shift that will open new panoramas of possibility.

More next week: we’ve got some work to do, together…

Bob Shank