I said at our Annual Meeting that I’ve long enjoyed the joke, “Welcome to New England — if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes.” Last weekend’s extreme cold snap is probably the most radical example most of us have ever seen. Friday’s 34°F became Saturday’s low of -9°F (with 21 mph wind!) became Sunday’s high of 50°F. If you spent a particularly lazy weekend day in a well-heated apartment, you could’ve missed the entire thing.

Most of us didn’t quite have that luxury. I heard more than a few stories of frozen pipes and frigid rooms on Sunday mornings, and that’s not even counting the text I got on Sunday morning from my friend Reid (an emergency-medicine physician at Boston Medical Center), with the simple message: “uh-oh,” and an attached video of himself sloshing through two inches of water on his way out of the ED, as water poured into the department through a burst pipe.

But if you neither particularly lazy nor particularly unlucky, you probably spent the weekend as I did. You checked that you had oil in the tank, piled on a few extra blankets, hunkered down, and hoped that the car would start when you needed to go out to buy a few more ingredients for pancakes. (It did.) The cold was sudden, and bitter, and brutal, and then it was gone.

I wonder how many seasons of our lives are basically like that. We go through periods of excitement and joy, spiritual fulfillment and religious devotion; and we go through periods of doubt and despair, of questioning and wandering. We enjoy seasons in which our relationships with friends or family or spouses feel easy and give us energy and life, and we go through seasons in which they are more difficult and drain our energy instead. I’m not talking, to be clear, about mental illness or depression or abuse—I just mean the lowest points of our ordinary, healthy lives.

There are books, workshops, and coaches dedicated to these dark and cold seasons of our lives. The “self-improvement market,” by some estimates, amounts to some $10 billion per year. And I can understand. When we find ourselves in one of these times, many of us assume that there must be something we can do, something we can read, someone who can give us the right advice or motivation to get us out of it. We sometimes even imagine that the answer is to change everything, to leave a job or a city or a spouse and to start anew.

But I wonder how much these spiritual winters are sometimes simply to be endured until they pass, times for humidifiers and extra blankets, but not for sudden change, phenomena that wash over us like a cold front, coming from who knows where and headed who knows where next, neither or fault nor our responsibility but simply something in the air, a season that may end slowly and gradually or a cold day that may snap back to be sixty degrees warmer tomorrow.

If this is true, then what a relief. Because it means that even if we never figure it out, even if we can’t manage to fix it ourselves, it will one day change. There’s nothing more terrifying, in the midst of one of these periods of spiritual winter, than the thought that it will go on forever. There’s nothing more comforting than the promise of spring.