on wintering and a new year

being a person of seasons

In the cosy days of Betwixtmas, between visits from friends’ kids and family members, I read Katherine May’s Wintering. It’s a book not specifically about the calendar seasons, as the title suggests, but about the ‘winter’ periods of one’s life—the times you’re pushed back from the regular pace of your life through things like illness, grief, caring responsibilities, depression, sheer bad luck. The times where the darkness overtakes the light for a wee while. May writes about how giving into these times rather than resisting them can be key to significant change; how leaning into the slowness and need for rest can allow transformation to occur, even when life is at its most difficult. It got me thinking a lot about seasonality; the movement of the year, the movement of a life. The shape of how we are in the world, and in ourselves, and how we react to these seasons.

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I lived in Panama City (in Panama the country, not Florida) for three years, during which the sun came up at the same time every single day, or thereabouts. In Panama, at 6:30am, the day begins. The music starts, the car horns ring out, the birds sing. Being a non-equatorial soul, it fucked with me: the way the year moved, or rather didn’t. It felt weird and static, with no sense of the peak and closure of the year, none of what Katherine May would call wintering; the bedding down, the taking stock, the changing against the dark.

It was only when I moved to Scotland—ten years ago, almost—that I realised how much this had affected me. I had become used to getting up with the sun—a romantic notion, which in practice in Scotland means being wide awake at 4am in June, and not being able to get out of bed until 9:30 or 10am in the deep days of winter, where the sun might technically be up but the weather wouldn’t let you know it. What I’ve now realised is that this is totally natural, for the northern folk at least. We should be sleeping like bears in the winter. We need the rest; the vitamin D is less available, the viruses spread more easily, the winter food—the root veg that grows here this time of year, the heavy dinners we need—takes more energy to digest. There are things our bodies require—sleep, rest, heavy food, slowness. It’s a time for thinking, for fermenting new ideas and changing in our cocoons. We should give rest and food and slowness and thought to our bodies, but we are mostly not allowed, because most of us work jobs that require us to get up at the same time every day of the year, and even if we are freelance and therefore slightly more in control of our days, reducing work hours in the winter is often not possible, financially or practically. We are asked—forced—to work against our instincts and needs. The fifty years of our working lives are meant to be one long, unwavering season. There is meant to be no time for thought, or change, or rest.

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Books like Wintering can often seem apolitical (though the discussion of our personal responses to capitalism’s demands is always, I think, political) and can lack a class analysis; it’s all well and good to say that people should rest and calm down, but who can do that apart from the most privileged? This is a common critique, which can sometimes be misplaced: to say something should be the case doesn’t mean that the writer believes only those who can achieve it now should get it. For many people it means that we should restructure society to allow it for everyone; that we can and should build a system that allows for illness and rest and grief and disability and not only for relentless productivity and economic growth. For what it’s worth, May’s book does discuss financial constraints—the challenges that her family will face and the precarity of their economic situation if she gives up the job which is hurting her—and acknowledges both the privileges and strains of her particular situation. But applying a critical lens is the job of the reader as well as the writer, and for me, the idea of wintering can be entangled with our political beliefs and actions too; we can believe in and work towards a system that allows for wintering. The concept of rest and recuperation is relevant not only to our work lives and personal lives but our political lives too; we can lose hope, and with the loss of hope comes apathy and inaction. We can burn out in more ways than one.

For me, the question of whether or not I have been looking after myself is one that’s tied with politics—and not just in a the personal is political way. Taking stock of how my life is running, the things I’m doing and the way I feel, is explicitly to ask about my own politics too. Our engagement with movements, with action, relies on space and time and energy. Our responses to other people’s political moves will be dictated by how we feel in our lives. If we see a protest and we feel nothing but anger at being made late for work, this tells us something; we are being encouraged to prioritise punctuality for a meeting over a cause. If we see someone upsetting a system and we feel anger even though we know the underlying cause is a good one, is it because we are too invested in that system? If we are irritated by people doing something we would have done ten years ago, is it because we’re jaded, or exhausted, or because we’re now invested in the structure we once would have opposed? Sometimes, we’re annoyed because the organising is bad or the argument stupid or the action hypocritical. Sometimes, it’s because we’ve changed.

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A woman I follow on Instagram does a lot of checking in with herself; things as small as am I enjoying this activity right now? Is it something I really actually want to spend time doing, or is it a hangover from who I was before? I’ve started doing this, in my mid-late 30s, and it helps me to think what feeds me and what doesn’t; what I am aiming towards and whether that’s something I actually believe in.

I have been asking myself these things over the last few weeks: Have I been who I want to be over the last year? Is the life I am leading now making me effective, compassionate, happy? Have I been as patient, as thoughtful as I want to be? Am I putting my energies towards the causes I believe in? For me, the answers here are not enough. I’ve suffered for the last three years from a stress-related digestive disorder that totally changed me in ways I didn’t like, the end point of a difficult six year period of having to hold everything together. Over recent months I had to take stock of where I’d got to and how. I looked down at some point and realised I was holding things I had never meant to pick up. In November I spoke to students who’d studied my work; they asked brilliant, thoughtful questions about my life and writing. One asked: You seem to do everything; how do you manage it? And I answered: I’m not; it’s killing me.

As May writes:

The problem with ‘everything’ is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.

The last three years, for me, have left too little space for the things I enjoy the most, for the person I really want to be. They have left too little time for my creative practice; in spring this year I realised I had barely written anything since the residency I went on eighteen months prior. Some of this has been necessary: I have been the sole earner in our house while my partner makes a change of career, something that has already proven to be a revolutionary change for both of us. But a year and a half paying the mortgage and tuition and everything else on one income required a manic approach to earning money. There was simply no space to say no; the ‘everything’ had become a whirlwind, carrying me along like a discarded crisp packet. The work week had spilled into almost every evening and almost every weekend. I was getting so little time to myself that I became enraged at the thought of having to go for a dinner with a beloved friend or to a party with people I adore, let alone be part of something useful politically.

At some point this year, I realised that the problem was myself. Yes, there were a ton of things that I was having to hold. But I had also, on some level, chosen to be this hectic, and was choosing it over and over again. I needed to earn, but we had enough money to get us through. I had too many things on my plate, but it was me that kept them there. As I said, wide eyed with revelation, to my partner: I think I am addicted to being stressed. The thing that had to change was me.

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I realise now that I am a person of seasons. I believe in starting things, doing them to the best of your ability, and closing them out. I believe in spring, summer, autumn and winter. You have to end some things for new ones to begin—whether that’s years, projects, friendships; anything you have outgrown, or tired of, or that doesn’t feed you any more. You have to winter to realise who you are now, and what you want out of the new spring. You have to make the changes slowly and thoughtfully to let something better bloom.

This Substack is part of the change I have needed; an intention to bring my writing practice back into my work week, to shift my focus back to my creative practice and my political and social thoughts. My personal situation has changed to allow me to do this: I am no longer the only earner, and our income is increasingly stable. Over the last four months or so I’ve looked at the things that were not making me excited and started to bring them to a close or hand them to someone else. To examine my responses to things happening around me, to look at my action or inaction on causes I believe in, and to shift my life balance in response.

I’ve made a dedication to focus more attention on the things that feed me, rather than drain me; to make sure I can say and do the things I think are important—both in terms of having the energy and the freedom to do so. To pay more mind to when things really should have been finished, and let them end. To make space for the things that I wanted to both finish and start, and to consider what my feelings were telling me about what constraints I had brought on myself. To think more collectively and contribute to change that is needed; to allow myself to be challenged and to let that challenge shape my actions. To create space to actually do, when doing is critical and effective; to go to a sit-in at a train station, to take a stand, to march and act and speak. These things are part of who we are too.

A coming spring can bring so much with it; a realignment, a new growth, a change of the angle of the sun. We can re-dedicate ourselves not just to our own health and happiness but to that of others as well. We can reassess the things we think and do, and change them for the betterment of all. Let’s make it that kind of spring.