Living for Today: Kierkegaard’s “The Lily and the Bird” on the necessity of winter
By Grace Heinz ’25
Winter is a difficult, frustrating time for many. Especially at Saint Olaf, where the winds on the hill blow 50 miles per hour and the snow stings your face. Almost everyone I know absolutely despises the months of January and February. It is the era of J-term; short days, grueling nights. Bundling up and wearing five layers to go to the dining hall. It’s bleak, it’s grey, it’s depressing. It’s also absolutely necessary. This is something I’ve contemplated more and more through my years at Saint Olaf. I am always wishing winter away, but I ask myself who I would be without these long months. I’ve come to learn and begrudgingly accept that winter is essential to spring, that we can’t enjoy beautiful sunny days without the dreary, cloudy ones.
It was, in fact, during the bleak month of January that I read something pertaining to this sentiment. Soren Kierkegaard’s The Lily and the Bird is a treatise on the importance of the present moment. In this work Kierkegaard writes of the lily of the field and the bird of the air, two beings which he considers exemplary of leading a joyful life. He writes that “the lily and the bird, the joyful teachers of joy, who, precisely because they are unconditionally joyful, are joy itself.” It is precisely because they live in the joy of today and want for so little that they experience such happiness. The lily, for example, who “knows that [Spring] will come at the appointed time; it knows that it would not benefit in any way whatsoever if it were permitted to determine the seasons of the year. It does not say, ‘When will we get rain?’ or ‘When will we have sunshine? Or ‘Now we have had too much rain,’ or ‘Now it is too hot.’…no, it keeps silent and waits.”
It is in the waiting that we forget the joy in today. As I grit my teeth and leave my dorm in apprehension, wishing that the snow would just melt already, I am ignoring today, the most important day of my life. If I can only be happy when the sun is out and everything is perfect, then I am like the “person whose joy is dependent upon certain conditions [who] is not himself joyful”. I am forgetting the unshakeable eternal summer within myself.
Hardship, turmoil, darkness, winter— all undeniable aspects of life which, when we are faced with them, we should not shun. They are precisely the forces that help us grow and evolve. They teach us to be kinder friends, attentive students, and compassionate community members. The winter of our lives is the very season that makes the summer possible. Of course, a part of me still desperately wants it to be May, to see the world come back into bloom. But I can’t forget the everlasting bloom within me and the people around me.
Grace Heinz is a senior French & Philosophy double major at St. Olaf.
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