The Servers of Spring - My Seasonal Reboot

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Today is the last day of winter in 2025… tomorrow spring begins.

Every year, without fail, spring reboots me. For some, it’s a lightening, a loosening, a surge of energy. For me, it’s a system crash masked as renewal. My eyes sting. My nose runs relentlessly. Sneezes erupt in bursts. Skin itches. Ears clog. And always, that low hum returns.

It’s a sound no one else hears… not the fridge’s drone, with its steady appliance bassline, but something deeper, stranger, like a file server on standby, quietly alive, serving out files in the background.

Since childhood, when that hum drowned out playground chatter, it’s driven me to distraction. I fought it with antihistamines, nasal sprays, cotton tips to clear my ears, and, like many, alcohol to mute the noise. I saw it as a glitch to silence. But it’s been two years since I leaned on those old remedies. This spring, I’m doubling down on that choice… to face the hum, to listen, and to let it speak.

The Hoarder’s House

Earlier today, I helped a friend collect some gifted furniture from a house in Mosman Park. The pick-up location was unlike anything most people have seen before… the home of an obsessive hoarder.

The little old Chinese lady who lived there greeted us in thick gloves and a face mask, and with quiet insistence offered masks for the four of us too. Her voice carried cautious anxiety as she repeated her request, and though we reassured her that we were young, fit and unconcerned, she only half-accepted it. That thread of unease wove through the whole encounter.

The sofa we came to collect was a deep maroon Chesterfield, tucked away in a cluttered upstairs room. To reach it felt like navigating a minefield… trip hazards every six inches, objects teetering in stacks that narrowed into paths. We had to shift boxes and piles of old magazines just to make our way upstairs. Clearing a blocked doorway finally gave us passage, and from there we had to manhandle the sofa down a twisted staircase… careful not to break our necks, drop the sofa, or damage her seemingly endless piles of clutter. Finally, upon edging it out through the rear sliding door, we all let out a collective sigh of relief.

The tension had been simmering since we arrived. Each time we asked to shift her belongings, she nodded permission, but her voice quavered, taut with unease. She spoke in hurried bursts, apologising for the clutter, each sorry heavy with the same anxious weight that seemed to anchor her home.

After loading the sofa onto the ute parked outside, we returned to say goodbye. The lady continued to apologise, her anxiety still at full volume. As I left, I noticed an old wooden rocking chair, tossed outside and neglected, turned half mouldy from sitting in the rain. When I asked about it, she waved it off… “Oh, you don’t want that chair, it’s very dirty.”

I chuckled at her reply and said I did want it, that I’d come back later to collect it. I told her it was just weathered timber… before it was a chair, it was a tree standing somewhere in a forest. Dirt to her, perhaps. But having walked through her home, which itself felt like a metaphor for a cluttered mind… heavy with accumulation… dirt clearly holds different meaning.

The Body as Server Room

The body, in spring, doesn’t greet renewal with open arms… it sputters. Pollen floods the air and my immune system flips into red-alert mode, interpreting everything as invasion. Histamine rises, sinuses clog, skin prickles, ears swell shut. It’s not graceful. It’s not poetic in the way people imagine spring. It’s messy, congested, overloaded.

But maybe that’s the poetry. Maybe the body isn’t malfunctioning… maybe it’s rebooting. Like a server room powering back on after a long winter shutdown, every fan spinning at once, every light flickering awake. Overheating for a moment before stabilising into steady function.

The hum in my ear is not error, but infrastructure. It reminds me that my body is not silence, not absence… it is machinery in motion. It’s a server I didn’t ask to run, but one that keeps serving anyway.

The Soundscape of Renewal

If I stop fighting it, will I hear spring differently?

Would sneezes became percussion: an abrupt cymbal crash punctuating the day. Sniffles and coughs, the wet clicks of woodwind. The constant hum in my ear, a low bass tone. Even silence might acquire shape… those fleeting moments between sneezes, those short breaths between irritations.

Spring isn't just a meadow of perfect birdsong… it’s a layered soundscape. Birdsong at the top register, yes… it’s traffic rumbling, dandelions radiating, insects buzzing, bodies sneezing, sinuses pulsing, machines droning. The full score of awakening, not the postcard version.

And it's not just external. Inside, my nerves jitter with static. Skin itches crackled like radio interference. Eyes water with distortion blur. The sensory overload isn't separate from spring… it was my body’s translation of it, an unfiltered feedback loop between self and season.

Reframing the Meltdown

It’s tempting to dull these seasonal storms with tablets, sprays, and avoidance. To flatten the experience until it barely registers. And sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes the body simply needs relief.

But there’s another path. To sit with it. To notice the meltdown not as failure but as data. To see the hum in my ear as standby noise, the sneezes as percussion, the itches as static. To hear the body as an instrument in spring’s orchestra… not as a broken machine trying to keep up.

What does it mean to treat discomfort as signal instead of flaw?

It means spring stops being a time of dread and becomes a time of observation. It means my body’s quirks and misfires turn into metaphors instead of mistakes. It means I learn something about systems… about how even when overloaded, even when humming, even when blocked, they’re still alive, still serving.

Order in the Noise

The fridge hums in the kitchen. Outside, birds trill their bright phrases. In my ear, the standby drone persists. Together, they form a triad of sound. Different origins, same reminder: noise is not absence of meaning. Noise is simply another layer of order… one I may not yet fully understand.

Spring, then, is not only flowers and clear skies. It is the return of the servers. It is the moment when the background processes of body and world make themselves heard. It is a season that does not politely knock… but barges in with pollen clouds and humming fans, forcing me to listen.

And if I can listen, if I can resist the urge to flatten the noise, then I find something unexpected: fascination.

Serving Out Reflections

Here I am now, tapping these words. My body hums. My ear drones. My mind serves out reflections like files called up from a server I didn’t know I owned.

The hoarder’s archive. The fridge drone. The bird chorus. The server hum in my head. Together, they write the essay for me. All I have to do is listen… not resist.

Spring is messy. It’s not the clean rebirth we imagine. It’s an update cycle, riddled with bugs, running loud before settling quiet. But maybe that’s exactly what renewal feels like when we stop pretending it’s painless.

Not a flawless new start…

Not silence, but hum…

Not absence, but presence…

The servers of spring are always humming. In sinuses, in fridges, in ear canals, in cluttered houses. Sometimes they sound chaotic, sometimes they sound anxious, and sometimes they sound like renewal itself.

Do you notice your own seasonal hums? The ones that come back every year, half-annoyance and half-message? Maybe they’re worth listening to… file by file.