Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

I am often taut with worry and sometimes feel as though we’re only a footstep away from chaos. But I have to hold my nerve, for fear of passing on my chronic sense of unbelonging in this world.

This, then, is how I turned my year: not in a single high-stakes moment, but in a series of gestures that gently acknowledge the change taking place but that mark the continuities as well.

If our current society lacks a way to offer us the meanings we seek, then it’s entirely reasonable to reimagine the old ways of doing it or to create new ones.

This is where we are now, endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life.

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.

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.

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.

I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive.