It happens every year, the physical arrival of spring; so why is it so astonishing? Haven’t you been begging for just this to dislodge the mud and despair of the past six weeks? Haven’t you been hoping each trip to the woodpile will be your last until Fall? It comes at first with small discoveries like coltsfoot on the bank of a roadside ditch, a single flower you point out to a granddaughter. It is she who finds another just a few steps away, and a few days later a host of them, too many to count. Every rainstorm brings new green and with it a sense of wonder.

It’s natural at my age to over-think the simplest truths. A grade-schooler understands that the revolution of our planet around the sun makes spring a certainty to count on year after year, but what does a grade-schooler know about mortality or about the suspicion you harbor that the joy of spring is mostly about the implicit promise that your life will be extended for another year? Another way to say this is that it is impossible to witness all this renewal and not feel a part of it. You walk differently when there is no ice to worry about, and you walk farther, making you stronger. Stronger, but not immortal. You understand that spring is for the young, but doesn’t it need your witness to reach its full potential?

It’s natural too, to be sentimental about spring, host of so many rites of passage like proms and graduations, first for you and then for your children and grandchildren. And isn’t it spring when most children learn to ride a bike? We follow the Roman calendar and start the year in the dim light of solstice, but in my heart the year begins with spring and morning dew on fresh, green grass.

Everything starts in spring: when I was young, it was the time for a new pair of Keds. My parents would give me the money and alone I would walk the mile or so to the sporting goods store where I could turn a $5 bill into new high-tops and a nickel in change. When I had the size right, the laces tight, I’d leave my old ones behind and run all the way home. This ritual may have happened just once or twice, but it is imprinted in my memory as an emblem.

More than anything, full-blown spring is about riotous beauty. The pear trees I see through a window explode into snowy blossom, and the apple trees soon follow with their red and pink buds. A mile or so away forsythia announces itself with a lurid fanfare, and dogwoods sing with delicate petals and scent. There is deep purpose to this beauty. Some call it design. Hungry birds and insects are lured to these blossoms, and their visits make them agents of propagation. Life goes on.

This renewal is so widespread and evident that even a skeptic like me has to wonder if there is a spirit behind it all. How else could all this immortal beauty happen? But then, if there is a divine artist behind it all, isn’t He/She also the architect of war and starvation, of disease and natural disaster, architect of every variation of human cruelty? What kind of god would take care to ensure such beauty, then turn an indifferent eye to suffering?

A better explanation for me is that random variation and the slow, steady process of evolution have produced this functional beauty. The cardinal sings so sweetly because his song works, and mating happens. The columbine that grows wildly has evolved on its own, not consciously with a plan for self-improvement, but with serendipitous beauty that attracts and keeps life going from one spring to the next.

To most people, such trust in benign accidents feels too chaotic. True enough, and don’t I try to order my life with plans and regimens and lists, with family traditions and secular rituals? But the idea that there is design and purpose to everything no matter how mysterious fails for me as a source of comfort.

The best way I can explain this is with a story about a sudden illness that nearly took my life 18 years ago. In just a few days’ time I went from robust health to life support in an ICU, with a pneumonia that went septic. I came very close to death, but over the next month my doctors at DHMC brought my lung infection under control, and I survived. Later that fall a pulmonologist at Mass General began a study of my case to determine whether there had been any genetic or environmental factors; after many tests, he determined that my illness had been a fluke, a random convergence of two infections that suddenly put my life at risk.

At first, I was a little disappointed. My illness had frightened me, and finding the cause seemed the key to making sure it wouldn’t happen again. Then, gradually I began to feel comfort in the fact that my illness had been random, an accident. I would have to be careful with colds, especially if they progressed to my chest; but the odds that all the factors that convened to make me sick once would happen a second time were tiny.

It’s a giant step from a stay in the ICU to the irrepressible joy brought by the onset of spring, but here I am again, beneficiary of this profusion of “accidental” beauty, of the luck of the draw, and of the sweet illusion that, for now at least, there is a place for me in this new year.

Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.