Spring does not wait until you are ready

“Spring does not wait until you are ready. It blooms anyway, and maybe that is the lesson.”

My mom always says that March is God’s way of asking what you plan to do with yourself. Back home, she never had to wait for permission to plant. The soil was always warm, the rain always came, and something was always growing whether you tended it or not. Here in Toronto, March feels like a dare. The snow is half-melted, the ground is soft but uncertain, and every green shoot pushing through frozen earth looks like defiance.

That is how healing feels in spring when you are Caribbean and living in diaspora. After months of surviving winter’s grip, something inside you starts to thaw, too. You feel it before you can name it: a restlessness, a hunger for colour and warmth that goes deeper than weather. Your body remembers a version of spring that didn’t require survival. It remembers year-round bloom.

I have been sitting with this tension in my own healing work this month. All winter I practised stillness, the quiet kind of mending that darkness demands. I drank my bush tea under the SAD lamp. I showed up for therapy when every bone in my body wanted to cancel. I let myself grieve the sun, and now spring is here, whispering something uncomfortable: stillness was the medicine, but it was never meant to be permanent.

This is where so many of us get stuck. We confuse healing with resting. We spend so long learning to sit with our pain that we forget to stand up and walk away from it. Spring does not let you stay comfortable in the cocoon. It demands emergence.

A woman in my healing circle said something last week that stopped the room: “I’ve been so busy healing that I forgot to start living.” She had spent two years in therapy, read every book, and done the inner child work, the shadow work, and the somatic work. Still, she was waiting. Waiting to feel “ready.” Waiting for the healing to be “done” before she allowed herself to grow.

Here is what I told her, and what I am telling myself: healing and growing are not sequential. They are simultaneous. You plant the garden while your hands are still shaking. You apply for the job while you are still working through imposter syndrome. You open your heart again while the last heartbreak is still teaching you something.

Caribbean people understand this intuitively. Our grandmothers did not stop cooking while they mourned. Our grandfathers did not stop building while they grieved the home they left behind. They healed in motion. They planted new roots in foreign soil while still aching for the ones they had pulled up. That was survival wisdom: life doesn’t pause for your pain, so you grow through it.

Spring in Toronto is Caribbean people’s season if we claim it. Every crocus pushing through half-frozen ground is doing what our ancestors did: blooming before anyone said it was possible. Every bud on a bare branch is an act of faith, not certainty.

So, what does spring healing look like? It looks like signing up for the thing you have been putting off. It looks like having the conversation you have been rehearsing since January. It looks like trading “I’m not ready” for “I’m ready enough.”

If you’ve been circling the idea of starting your healing journey, or restarting one that stalled, spring is your sign. You don’t need to have it all figured out.

This spring, I am choosing growth over comfort. I’m planting seeds in soil that still feels cold, trusting the warmth is coming because it always does, even in Canada, even for us, even when March feels more like a threat than a promise.

Spring doesn’t wait until you are ready. It blooms anyway. That’s the lesson.