Untangling winter’s sacred lessons of melancholy … and wonder

By Mary Kay Roth

One cold, snowy evening, earlier this week, I sat in front of the fire, my dog’s head upon my lap, flames dancing and flickering, embers glowing red hot. The storm outside had passed and – except for the crackle of burning logs – stillness prowled about.

These rare moments border on the mystical for me.  In this instant, despite a spirit ragged from raging at the injustices of humankind, my heart was full.

I let go of …

• The debt limit, which I will never really understand.
• The jigsaw puzzle of “classified documents.” 
• The guy with the snow blower who – for some mysterious reason – keeps blowing his snow into the street.
• The sad reality that good guys often die too soon.

Snuggling yet solitary, absorbed in the trance of the fire and the silence of the moment, I was at peace. 

Truth is, we have roughly 4,000 weeks in our life on this earth. And yet somehow, we get so overwhelmed with productivity, cranking through as many tasks as possible, conquering to-do lists, angry over what is going wrong, that we often miss the point. 

We miss the magic, the surprise of these golden moments.

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of the wonder,” says Oliver Burkeman, who wrote Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.

Strangely, even fortuitously, I find winter is the season that can best teach us these lessons.  Winter pries us open with its melancholy richness, cradling the darkest of dark nights, the most hushed of quiet. 

“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,” says Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. “It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order … It is an untangling, a moment to feel the true ache of desire, the gentle wash of self-compassion, the heart swell of thanks, the tick tick tick of existence. It is a moment when, alone, I am at my most connected with others.” 

Winter extends its invitation with a frosty embrace, welcoming us into the deep, cozy cave of hibernation.  Bidding us to rest – breathe – sleep – accept the hard stuff – and, by god, cherish the good. 

The trick, of course, is to heed the lessons. To find relief from our digital overdose. To stop. To start bailing when we are swamped with that almost irresistible deluge of jammed inboxes, self-help inventories, a gnawing sense we ought to be doing more. 

Last year, an estimated 3 to 4 million podcasts babbled into our ears. We spent 700 million minutes on Facebook, monthly. Almost 3 million emails were sent per second.  Top-10 book lists came at us from every direction.  And on any given week, U.S. audiences watched a massive 183 billion minutes of live streaming video content.

Wintering tells us: “In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter.  We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us good.”

Don’t get me wrong. I like to read, listen, watch movies.

The problem is that doing ‘everything’ ends up looking an awful lot like doing nothing, one long fog of frantic. The dilemma to believing everything is urgent, is that we can never do enough.  Bizarrely, we only feel busier, emptier, hollowed out.

Four Thousand Weeks warns:  “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; or when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.  Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.” 

And yet, there’s a giddy freedom in bowing to defeat, and winter gives us permission to lean into that submission.  To hide away from the world for a while. Believe in the unpredictability of our place on this earth – and be ok with that.  To find our way back home.

Several years ago, just as the pandemic was beginning to ease, New York writer and director Julio Vincent Gambuto wrote an essay, asking us to hold tight to what he called “The Great Pause”– to consider making new choices about how we use the hours of our lives.

“I hope you might consider this: What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. It is, in a word, profound … Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window.  I know it hurts your eyes … But the curtain is wide open … The Great American Return to Normal is coming … but I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is a rare and truly sacred opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer.” 

Winter gives us that same opportunity, a chance to find our way back to those sacred moments …  

• Of taking a morning walk – without measuring steps or snapping pictures. 
• Of watching a cardinal perch against the stark landscape of winter white.
• Of spinning around an ice-skating rink and thinking only of placing one blade in front of another.
• Of spending an evening of candlelight with a friend who gets us, who tolerates our gloom, who accepts that we can’t always hang on – that sometimes everything breaks.  

Rest assured, I will never stop raging at and tilting at windmills. In all honesty, a great deal of life will always suck.

“We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally," Burkeman cautions in Four Thousand Words.  "We don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves – and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. We recoil from the notion that this is it – that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.” 

In fact, this is the gift we have been given, 4,000 precious weeks.  

And in those weeks, there will be times we’re riding high and times when we can’t bear to get out of bed.  

We need to give ourselves a break and be kind.  To find our own grit, in our own time. To trust and let people in. To pause for those golden moments.

And so, for tonight, I’ll sit by the fire, knowing that in the deepest of winter – if we are perfectly still – we will hear the first robin begin to sing. The thaw begin to burble.  The wonder of life whisper as it awakens from the chill.