Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

At seventeen, I was hit with a bout of depression so hard that it immobilised me for months. I was convinced that I would not survive it. I was convinced that I didn’t want to. But somewhere there, in the depths, I found the seed of a will to live, and its tenacity surprised me. More than that, it made me strangely optimistic.

Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while.

If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you. It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Having rumbled along on high for years, my stress level has reached a kind of crescendo. I feel physically unable to go into work, as though I’m connected to the house by a piece of elastic that pings me back indoors whenever I attempt my commute. It is more than a mere whim; it is an absolute bodily refusal. I’ve been pushing through this for a long time now, but something has finally snapped. Perhaps literally.

The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.

But here I am, having worked so hard and for so long that I’ve made myself sick. And worst of all, I’ve nearly forgotten how to rest. I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough.

Halloween is an overturning of the natural order, with a lineage in old traditions of reversing the roles, letting the poor become rulers, and bringing the rich low. There has long been a feverish link between monsters and mockery, and those without power have often been given licence to play at the edges of civility in order to quell more dangerous lurches towards riot and rebellion. At Halloween, the next generation gets to express their wound-up potential for making trouble, and so offers us a comforting vision of the restraint they show during the rest of the year. For Bert, who is a decade away from all-out insurgency, Halloween is the festival that gives him access to the encroaching winter nights, letting him dress up and go brazenly out into the dark evening, knocking on unfamiliar doors. He wants the camp pantomime of Halloween, the last outpost of summer before his playtime gets seriously restricted by the dark.

He points to the candles on the altar, lights a third in his hand, and tells a carefully sanitised version of the life of Sankta Lucia, who made sacrifices for her faith in God. Lucy’s martyrdom is not his point today; instead, he wants us to think about the simple gestures by which we can bring light into the world. “Every one of us is a lit candle,” he says.

So I finally let his words sink in. I pulled him out of school and shrugged off suggestions for ways to shoehorn him back in again: how to threaten and cajole; how to charm him into tolerating it; whether to medicate him into submission. I would do none of those things. I was not willing to get him back into school by breaking him, however desperate I was for my own time again. I, who had essentially liked the rhythm and challenge of school, came to realise how many people found school an utter endurance—yet many of them believed that our children should endure it, too, for fourteen painful years of their life. I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content. I was not willing to do that. I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict—achieving your potential and not being completely miserable. Happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn. It is not a part of ourselves that should be hived off into a dark corner, the shameful territory of the wilfully naive.

But if happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.

Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would.

I am reminded yet again of the quiet value of ritual in my life, and of the words of D. H. Lawrence: “We must get back into relation: vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe . . . We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last.”

Then we enter that strange period between Christmas and New Year, when time seems to muddle, and we find ourselves asking again and again, What day is it? What date? I always mean to work on these days, or at least to write, but this year, like every other, I find myself unable to gather up the necessary intent. I used to think that these were wasted days, but I now realise that’s the point. I am doing nothing very much, not even actively being on holiday.

“This isn’t about you getting fixed,” he said. “This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”

“Nobody had ever said to me, ‘You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.’

A biologist by training, Dorte began to look at the recent research into her condition and came across the work of Edward Bullmore, a Cambridge neuroscientist who believes that depression is caused by inflammation in the brain. In this context, the effect of the cold made sense. “I’m treating my brain like an inflamed joint,” she says.

By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilient kept us afloat.

In teaching, you cannot walk into the room unhappy or unwilling. You must sacrifice your own energy for your students’, throw your personal reluctance onto the pyre of their lack of interest. You must do without the traditional pedagogic luxury of believing that the people you teach are lazy or rude or entitled. You do it instead, knowing that they are all straining under the load of their own grief, their own fear, their own burdens of work and care.

In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable.

“Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”