Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been waiting an entire decade for the weather to be this nice again? I know spring officially started a month ago, but it hadn’t really felt like it. Well, that entirely changed after this week, after the comeback of prevalent sunny skies and twenty-plus-degrees temperatures during most of the day. Any lingering doubts in the most skeptical have been entirely wiped out: it’s no longer winter.
You can already spot white and yellow flowers growing on each corner of the campus. Hundreds of trees are finally hiding their apathetic branches as they make room for bright green foliage. And people, they are all crawling out of their caves, leaving their gloves and scarves at the very bottom of their drawers, where they once buried their sunglasses. Personally, I couldn’t be happier that my weary jacket will, at last, get a proper vacation.
Naturally, hordes of students are taking over the areas next to the campus’ lakes. Dozens of training sessions are being held outdoors, people are playing music, tossing balls around. And finally, my friends are speaking again about making barbecues during the weekend. Everybody wants to be outside the buildings because life on campus’ now resembles a movie with a surf rock soundtrack in the background.
I must acknowledge it wasn’t until I lived in a country where clouds are filling the skies 75% of the year’s time that I could truly appreciate how the sun simply changes everything. I no longer take this weather talk lightly, even though we like to regard it as a chit-chat topic we only recur to when we want to get out of an awkward silence. I believe the real reason why weather so easily returns to our conversations with random acquaintances is that there are very few things that we all get to experience collectively in a similar way and the weather is one of them.
As the sun grants us this shared joy, consider how successful it is at actually improving our mood and atmosphere. It has only been out for a few days and I already feel like people are smiling to me way more often. That is not such a trivial thing to say during finals’ weeks, which came just in time to close a quartile that took place amidst a cold, long winter.
It might still take a while for all of our foggy, cloudy brains to catch up with the spring. Exams or deadlines might definitely undermine our sunny experience for some time, but do not despair. Even if you’re swarmed in work right now and have to stay inside your office or the library for most of the daylight, look outside the window: spring is here and despite some casual rain in the forecast, the sun will keep coming back to leave its mark on our environment.
