Personal Reflections on Wintering (+ A Playlist)
Last spring, as winter was well behind me and flowers were starting to bloom, I started reading Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. I was a season behind but the book taught me so much about the concept of “wintering”—navigating periods of loss, struggle, or dormancy. May uses the season of winter as a metaphor for difficult or “fallow” periods in our lives. I think the perspective May offered that I so badly needed to see is that we all have winters in life, at many different times in life. It may be because of the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship or marriage, or a period of depression. Periods of winter may come because of less dramatic changes too, such as experiencing a professional slump or starting a new job or role. There are many variations of winter. May points out that our task is not necessarily to try to will ourselves out of this state, but to see it for what it is—an important period of restoration and healing—and take care of ourselves as best we can through it. These periods of struggle are part of our rich life journeys and are necessary for renewal. Winter leads to spring, a time of blossoming and re-birth. There is no spring without winter.
When I was in my 20s, I remember hearing so many friends talk about how they dreaded winter and when winter arrived and the holidays were over, they’d talk about their longing for summer. I thought this was interesting because I wondered if I could actually enjoy summer if I had the choice to experience it infinitely. I suspected I’d get sick of the heat, the humidity, the t-shirts and shorts. I couldn’t connect to that desire for an endless summer because I needed downtime, a slower pace.
If we think of winter as the death of a year, we can use this season as a time to acknowledge our losses and grieve. We can process what we’ve been through so far, either in life or more recently. This time of reflection can ground and heal us. And to me, that’s really different from the relentlessly optimistic feeling associated with the New Year, which is supposedly an occasion to be a better version of ourselves. Ironically, as a person whose life is devoted to people interested in working on themselves, I’m very suspicious of self-improvement. Maybe what I mean is that there’s kind of a perfectionism in self-improvement that can get in the way of enjoying who you are.
What I have found in the past few years since turning 40 is that when I gently embrace my fallow periods, I am also clarifying who I am. By strengthening my self-knowledge and identity in this way, I can more readily connect to my values and set goals for myself. At 43 years old, I can see that life has its own seasons. That’s not what we’re told about life though. That’s also not what we’re taught in psychologist school. That’s something I learned through personal experience and writing from disciplines outside of psychological science. We receive very misleading messages about the life journey starting early in life. Here are some of the common fallacies we are subjected to:
Progress is linear
We must always achieve something
We should feel happy and excited all the time
Being bored is bad
Having spare time means we’re not doing enough
We must be at peak productivity all the time
We should have the same level of energy at all times, for all things
I think these fallacies are likely universal but they may be more pronounced in some APIDA communities, particularly the beliefs around achievement and spare time. Many immigrant parents may have emphasized the importance of not “wasting” time as a way to cope with the anxiety of surviving in a new country. These ideas often manifest in a busy-ness that is ubiquitous in American culture. There are times in our lives when we choose to be busy because we’re not approaching time with intention. And there are times in our lives when we’re busy even though we don’t want to be because of work or caregiving or just life events that come up. We need fallow periods because being busy is not a rhythm that lends itself to depth, processing, and contemplation. Being busy fills time, making it go by quickly, whereas resting expands time, slowing it down.
Wintering is about embracing a period of restoration and slowness so that we can prepare for renewal. Wintering is burnout prevention. Wintering is clarification. Wintering is anti-FOMO because its premise is that not doing offers us more than stretching ourselves thin. I’m reminded here of my favorite quote from the Dalai Lama: “We are human beings, not human doings.” There is still time to embrace your winter, whether it’s the actual season or a fallow period of your life. Listen to what your winter is telling you. What can you do during this period to accept, learn, and grow? I love supporting clients through their winters in life because even though it’s never an easy time, I witness over and over again how they use our therapeutic relationship to forge new identities and tools that lead to growth and renewal. It is a marvelous transformation to behold!
So, give yourself permission to winter. Take a bath, make a comforting soup, sleep more by going to bed early and/or rising later and by napping, spend extra time with your kids and pets, do nothing, read a book or magazine, drink tea or hot water. Just sit and listen to a song. And if you need something to listen to, here’s my Wintering playlist for this year. Enjoy, relax. Come back to yourself.