Sometimes writing is a race against your own mind, as your hand labours to keep up with the tide of your thoughts, and I feel that most acutely at night, when there are no competing demands on my attention.

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

Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.

The loose communities that we find in spiritual or religious gatherings were once entirely ordinary to us, but now it seems more radical to join them, a brazen challenge to the strictures of the nuclear family, the tendency to stick within tight friendship groups, the shrinking away from the awe-inspiring. Congregations are elastic, stretching to t

forgotten how to rest. I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough.

In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter.

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.

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.

Certainty is a dead space, in which there’s no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be travelling between the two.