Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries

Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.

However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.

The times when we fall out of sync with everyday life remain taboo. We’re not raised to recognise wintering or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure. Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.

stress is a shameful thing, a proclamation of my inability to cope. I am slyly pleased that I have pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my own overwhelm. It feels more concrete somehow. I can hide behind it and say, See, I am not unable to manage my workload. I am legitimately ill.

At these moments in life, you have to keep moving somehow.

There’s not a single soothing place left in the house, where you can rest a while without being reminded that something needs to be mended or cleaned.

I can smell the changing of the seasons.

Me too.

I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I’m afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me.

This is the worst.

That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope.

In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north. I have a kind of boreal wanderlust, an urge towards the top of the world where the ice intrudes. In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered. I have faith in the practicality of the north, its ability to prepare and endure, the peaks and troughs of its seasons. The warm-weather destinations of the south seem unreal to me, its calendar too unchanging. I love the revolutions that winter brings.

Same

Life is clearly teaching me some kind of lesson, but I can’t decipher it yet. I’m worried that it’s about doing less, about staying at home and giving up on adventures for a while. That’s not something I want to learn.

Ha!

I’m certain that the cold has healing powers that I don’t yet come close to understanding. After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?

When November comes, I have no desire to leave the house after dark. My instinct is to hibernate the evenings away.

I don’t mind staying in. I realise that for plenty of people, it feels like a brutal restriction of their freedom, but it suits me down to the ground.

I could not, in the tradition of various twelve-step programmes, defer to a higher power without knowing exactly what that higher power constituted, what they would have me believe, and whether I agree with their principles. I am a profoundly rational being, prone to asking questions. I cannot accept vagueness. I require a systematic understanding of any beliefs that I might hold. I need them to make coherent sense.

One recent study found that knitting can lower blood pressure as much as yoga, and can also help to relieve sufferers of chronic pain by releasing serotonin. The charity Knit for Peace conducted research on the health benefits of crafting and found that it had a range of benefits, including maintaining mental sharpness, helping smokers to quit, and reducing loneliness and isolation in the elderly.

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. You walk into your classroom and try to entertain this mass of people just enough for them to learn something that will help to alleviate their woes in the future.

People used to complain that I talked at them instead of to them, so I discovered that I could inflect my sentences with moments of mock hesitation, adding in ums and ers to appear more uncertain than I actually felt.

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.

Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair.

It often seems easier to stay in winter, burrowed down into our hibernation nests, away from the glare of the sun. But we are brave, and the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of wings.