Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

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.

I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this, whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.

I have used up all my energy just to see this, and it was worth it. But how could I ever justify that to the outside world? How could I ever admit that I chose the muffled roar of starlings over the noisy demands of the workplace? I go home and sleep off the pathetic exertions of my morning.

Heat is a blunt instrument, but warmth is relative. We feel warmer for knowing that it’s freezing outside.

Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

Winter is asking me to be more careful with my energies and to rest a while until spring.

I am a seething mess of uncertainty, my mind so full of forked paths that I worry it could spill. I want to be everything, but I am nothing.

Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth: “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.”

For Watts, the only moment we can depend on is the present: that which we know and sense right now. The past is gone. The future, to which we devote so much of our brainpower, is an unstable element, entirely unknowable, “a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp.”

This is where we are now, endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life. I always read brutality in those messages: they offer next to nothing.

After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression. We’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both in fact require a little perspective.