Wintering by Katherine May is a beautiful personal narrative of going through a ‘wintering’ season and what they looked like as she navigated her husband’s illness, her son stopping school, and her medical issues. It discusses the transformative season of winter and rest and retreat. 

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. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child. 

However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable. 

We’re not raised to recognize 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. 

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, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficacy and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. 

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. 

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. 

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named hygge their word of the year. The meaning of this Danish term is now well known; it represents coziness  as a kind of mindful practice, a turning towards domesticated comfort to console us against the harshness of the world outside. 

Another truth about Wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once its over, its 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. 

The NADIR- the moment when things have got so bad that you can’t imagine a way out.

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