There’s a Word for What I’m Experiencing: Wintering. Maybe You’re Feeling it Too

I came across a helpful word recently: wintering.

Author Katherine May uses it to describe those moments when life turns cold through crisis or loss and we find ourselves living at a different, slower pace to everyone else. As winter is a time of retreat and hibernation for much of the natural world, wintering is the process by which our bodies and souls seek rest and recuperation when the clouds descend and light fades.

After losing my father​ in September, I’ve found myself in this wintery slowed-down world. It’s not like I’m in the depths of grief still (although I miss dad greatly and find him often visiting my dreams). ​It’s just that I’ve been operating on half power, with little energy for people or projects, social gatherings like church sapping me and my work taking longer to complete.

Can you relate?

Fighting Winter

Main image by photo nic. Above by Atle Mo (creative commons)

This is a new experience for me, and I’ve been keen to get back to the life and energy of summer – internally fighting winter, if you will. But as Katherine May notes, this is an attitude foreign to the rest of the created order:

“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 they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential.”

Slowly, Slowly

Image by freestocks (creative commons)

The Book of Ecclesiastes famously talks about there being a ‘season’ for everything—that there’s a time to plant and a time to harvest; a time to demolish and to rebuild; to mourn and dance, to cry and laugh. I’ve read these words for years but are perhaps only now starting to understand them. Not only does this approach to life suggest each season is finite, the next one surely on its way, but that God has something significant to do in us through each of them. In God’s hands seasons are purposeful things. Remember that, Sheridan.

In her fine book Walking Through Winter, Katherine Gantlett offers another metaphor for wintering via her experience climbing Kilimanjaro. As cold and testing as the trek was, it wasn’t the walking itself that she found most difficult, but getting used to the altitude. For this reason, instead of taking a three day route to reach the summit, Katherine and her husband chose a five day route to help their bodies gradually acclimatise to the reduced oxygen levels.

“In addition to our choice of route,” Katherine writes, “our guides made us walk much more slowly than we would otherwise have chosen to. Their favourite phrase was pole, pole, which means ‘slowly, slowly’ in Swahili. Those who rush to reach the summit are more often the ones who fail to make it because they don’t give their bodies time to adjust to the altitude.”


We can’t rush any season, let alone winter. So let it do its job. Slowly, slowly.

Wintering is there to help us adapt and rejuvenate.

Rest, reflect, put the house in order.

Spring will surely come in time.

More

Listen to Sheridan talk about this on BBC Radio 2’s Zoe Ball Breakfast Show

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Comments:

  • February 1, 2022
    Maureen Watson

    Thank you for that word and reminder Sheridan. So encouraging and full of hope., Bless you.

    reply
    • February 1, 2022
      Sheridan Voysey

      Thanks Maureen!

      reply
  • February 1, 2022
    Anne Le Tissier

    Thank you, Sheridan. This resonates deeply with a situation I’ve been dealing with since mid-November and will help me slow down, take stock, and trust for Spring.
    You’re often on my heart in your grief for your Dad, so these words also resonate with that… Thank you for your transparency, and your giving out from your own place of pain that we might receive encouragement in our ‘wintering’.

    reply
    • February 1, 2022
      Sheridan Voysey

      Thanks so much for that Anne. Isn’t it funny how we need to give ourselves permission to slow down, take stock? There’s something in me that sees some error in that when there’s not. Trying to get better, though :).

      reply
  • February 1, 2022
    Merle Smith

    February 1 , 2022 This is very timely Sheridan for my family situation. Our gorgeous Mum is very ill at present and reading your description of wintering makes me realize that is exactly what I am doing….slowing down , reflecting, taking time to rejuvenate. Thank you for your sharing the reality of how you have been feeling with the loss of your Dad. We so appreciate your writings.

    reply
    • February 1, 2022
      Sheridan Voysey

      Thank you, Merle. So glad this can help you a little in your time of need. We pass on what we find as we walk, right? I’m sure you’ve done the same many a time. Blessings for the days ahead.

      reply
  • February 2, 2022
    Clare

    I’ve become so familiar with wintering! At various different seasons of my life. .
    It has taught me that there’s much more to life than being insanely busy, having a fancy career path , and being “productive”. Sometimes in “unproductive” times, that is when the most important things get done— resetting , reflecting, actually thinking deeply about things, listening, learning considering our path , finding worth and value in smaller things, or just resting. It’s when we learn the small things are really big.

    reply
    • February 2, 2022
      Sheridan Voysey

      Beautifully said!

      reply
  • February 11, 2022
    Sarah

    Dear Sheridan,

    Thank you so much for this post! It’s amazing you should post this as I found myself clearly identifying with ‘winter’ this season and have also recently read Katherine May’s book, the title of which caught my attention in a local bookshop last month. Your piece on Winter in ‘Reflect’ and Katherine Gantlett’s ‘Walking through winter’, which I am currently still reading, have been gifts at this time too. ‘Winter’ can come in so many different forms – as a winter of loss, of which Gantlett writes, or as a winter of adversity or of weariness or of waiting, and I am grateful for companions along the way who have written of this season! Thank you!

    reply

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