There is something about spring that quietly insists we pay attention.
After months of unusually cold weather for most, the world outside is beginning to do something almost unreasonable: it blooms. Not all at once, and not without setbacks — a cold snap here, a late frost there — but it blooms nonetheless. And like every other year, I find myself surprised by it. Not because I didn’t know it was coming, but because knowing something is coming and actually seeing it are two entirely different experiences.
I’ve been thinking about that gap lately — between knowing and seeing — and how much it applies to the work we do at Crossing Party Lines.
So many of us come to CPL carrying a kind of weary certainty. We are certain we know what the other side thinks. We are sure we know how this conversation is going to go. We are convinced that nothing we say will make a difference, and nothing they say will change our minds. We know, and so we stop looking. We stop being surprised. And when we stop being surprised, we stop being curious — and that, more than any single policy disagreement, is where connection goes to die.
Curiosity is CPL’s most essential tool. Not agreement. Not compromise. Not even kindness, as important as that is. Curiosity — the genuine willingness to be surprised by another person — is what opens the door. And like so much that matters, it is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is a practice. A choice. Something you have to decide to do, again and again, especially when everything in you would rather be right than be interested.
Spring, I think, is a good teacher of this. The natural world doesn’t ask whether we deserve its renewal. It doesn’t wait until we’ve resolved our differences or earned our fresh start. It simply begins again, and invites us to notice.
We are in a hard political moment. Many of our members have told us they feel tired — tired of the noise, tired of the anger, tired of feeling like the country they love is receding from them. We hear that. We feel it too. And we also know, from nine years of sitting in rooms — virtual and otherwise — with people who disagree with each other, that the tiredness is not the whole story. It never is.
Because in those rooms, something else happens. A person says something unexpected. A question catches someone off guard. A moment of genuine listening lands somewhere it wasn’t supposed to. And for a few seconds, the certainty softens and something alive comes through — something that feels, if you’ll forgive the seasonal metaphor, a little like a crocus pushing up through frozen ground.
That is what we are here for. That is what we are asking you to stay open to, even now — especially now.
This spring, we invite you to try one small experiment in curiosity. It doesn’t have to be big or brave. It could be as simple as asking someone a question you don’t already know the answer to, and then — this is the important part — actually listening to find out. Not to respond. Not to rebut. Just to learn something new about another person who shares this complicated, beautiful, maddening country with you.
Spring is here. Something is blooming. Let’s go find out what it is.
