Spring Comes and the Grass Grows By Itself: A Counterculture Guide to Renewal

 Here's a radical idea for this spring: do less.

Not nothing... though honestly, nothing is also on the table. Just… less. Less forcing, less optimizing, less stuffing your schedule with self-improvement projects and to-do lists and content you feel obligated to consume. Less fighting your own nature.

Because here's what nature is actually doing right now: it's not hustling. It's allowing.

What Spring Is Actually Trying to Teach You

There's an old haiku line that Joy Lab host Henry Emmons is thoroughly obsessed with (lol): "Spring comes and the grass grows by itself."

It's not subtle. Growth just doesn't sustainably happen through an endless supply of willpower. It often happens when conditions are right and you stop getting in the way of it.

The problem? Most of us live in an "always-on" culture. We're overworked, overscheduled, overperforming, and constantly consuming information that pulls us further from our own inner signal. Spring arrives and instead of thawing out, we try to pack it all in. And we end up more depleted than when winter started.

Sound familiar?

The Science of Doing Less

Research is increasingly clear that even having your phone nearby impairs cognitive functioning. You don't have to be scrolling for your brain to suffer as proximity alone is enough to fracture your focus and crowd out the quiet where renewal actually lives.

Your nervous system needs alternating cycles of activity and rest to function well. Skip the rest, and you're not thriving, you're just surviving on fumes.

Three Ways to Renew This Spring

You don't need a new plan. You need space for what already wants to grow. Here are three ways to create it:

1. Go deeper, not wider. Return to a practice that already sparked something in you. Revisit it with fresh eyes. Notice what's different now.
2. Integrate what you already know. Addition by subtraction. Take things off your plate — information, news, others' opinions. What you need, you may already have.
3. Actually rest. Take a nap. Watch the birds. Rollerblade if the mood strikes. Just pause and take some full, deep breaths. As poet Mary Oliver wrote, "Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"

The Invitation

This April, Joy Lab is doing something countercultural: slowing down on purpose. Encore episodes drop every Wednesday this month. Think of them as a little water, a little warmth, a little encouragement for whatever wants to grow in you.

As Wayne Muller wrote: "In the relentless busyness of modern life, we have lost the rhythm between work and rest."

This month, we're finding it again.

🎧 Listen to the full episode (episode 258) wherever you get your podcasts. 

🎧 Listen at our website.