At first glance, the idea of five weeks in April feels impossible. April is a month we think we know well: brisk, boundaried, fleeting. Thirty days, no more. It arrives just as winter loosens its grip, yet never lingers long enough to claim the full warmth of spring. It is, by its very nature, a month of transition.
And yet — if you watch the calendar closely, if you really see it — you will notice something quietly subversive. April sometimes brushes against five weeks. It slips across them like sunlight through bare branches, not claiming them in full, but reaching nonetheless. The month holds more than it seems, not by adding days, but by making the most of the days it has.
There is wisdom here for anyone called to lead. Leadership, like the turning of the calendar, is an exercise in tension between structure and possibility. We are handed our limitations: the fiscal year, the enrollment cycle, the team we have, the time we cannot stretch. We live in ‘thirty-day months.’ We do not always control the landscape we inherit. But great leaders learn to work not just within those frames — but between them.
They understand that time, though linear, is elastic in experience. An ordinary day, used well, stretches like sunlight at dusk. A moment of clarity in a crowded week can shift the course of an entire season. Constraints — those immovable boundaries we so often resent — become unlikely sources of creativity. As every seasoned leader learns, it is not abundance that drives ingenuity, but the beautiful pressure of not quite enough.
What is leadership, if not this very act of stretching the month? It is the courage to begin, even when the starting line feels uncertain. April does not wait for perfect conditions to bloom. It pushes forward — buds breaking through cold soil — because the time is now.
It is the perseverance to carry through the long middle. Leadership is rarely a sprint from breakthrough to breakthrough. It is the quiet resolve to move steadily in the unseen hours, to tend to the roots when the leaves are slow to emerge.
It is the resilience to face moments of fatigue — when goals seem distant, and progress feels imperceptible. Like the late days of April, when winter still whispers at the edges, there are times when the promise of spring feels like a lie. But still, we carry on.
And then, when we have done all of this — when we have shown up fully, when we have given our effort without promise of reward — something remarkable happens. We discover there is more space than we expected. That the ‘five weeks of April’ were not a gift of time, but a creation of effort. We stretched the days not by adding to them, but by filling them completely.
Leaders who understand this live differently. They do not wait for the calendar to give them extra weeks. They make room. They make meaning. They breathe life into the spaces others overlook. They find time not in the abundance of hours, but in the abundance of purpose.
And in this, they reveal a deeper truth: Leadership is not about controlling the length of the season — but mastering the way we move within it. April, in all her brevity, reminds us: the limits are real, but so is our capacity to reach beyond them.
There will never be five full weeks in April. But there will always be the chance to live as though there were. And that is the mark of a leader.