There is something about the season of winter that I find difficult. While everything around me is still, silent and seemingly calm, everything inside of me wants to leap into action. This feeling is not new for me nor is it present all of the time, but as someone who lives her life with a lot of forward moving energy, it is a common one. To slow down and wait is foreign to my Aries nature – an April baby born a month early. Apparently, I did not like waiting in the womb either.
This year has been different than previous winters, however. While the feeling of wanting to leap into action persists, I don’t know which direction to run, nor do I have the energy to do so. I have wondered if I am falling into a depression or experiencing some sort of existential loneliness. The telltale symptoms of irritability, loss of interest and motivation, interrupted sleep and social withdrawal have all resonated. Yet the desperation and hopelessness I have known in the past when plagued by these conditions has been less apparent, if not absent. What to make of this?
One of my recent disciplines is to ask myself when encountering a challenge, “How is this situation for me?” It is so easy to think that something is wrong when the road of life gets bumpy. Yet the path of the soul is always to grow, and thus it is inherently uncertain and uncomfortable at times. To say yes to the invitations of the soul is to venture into new territory by revisiting familiar landscapes with new awarenesses. And so as eager as I am for spring crocuses to emerge, maybe the frozen ground of winter is not as empty as it seems. Maybe winter actually has something to offer me.
What is it about the landscape of winter that I find so hard to endure? It is the fact that the signs of life I attune to are absent, and what is to be born is not yet apparent. This sense of lack makes me restless and insecure, and sends my thoughts down fear-driven spirals. What if nothing grows? Where should I focus my energy? If I don’t know, why am I even here? … The me who finds safety and clarity through understanding her environment is disoriented, like I am trying to have a conversation with words when the only language spoken is silence. And so if I am to understand this season, and the me who is navigating it, I need to connect with it in a different way. I need to listen for what is there instead of searching for what is not.
When I look at winter in a way that merely notices instead of incessantly searches, the season speaks hints of a new language to me. The bare branches reveal a vast sky that has always been there but that I have taken for granted when foliage abounds, and the long shadows at the end of the day take my eyes to mysterious places normally hidden. Even the invisible air takes on a misty white haze to show me my very breath. It’s as if all of life is slowing down to show me where it came from, and from where it will emerge again. This is reassuring to me, like discovering solid ground when I thought I had lost my footing. In this way, winter begins to feel gracious instead of miserly, and like a source of calm instead of restlessness.
This winter, I want to travel my inner landscape in this same spirit of open-ness and generosity. I want to see the bare branches of my life not as a sign of failure, but as a chance for me to settle into my roots, and to notice the abundance of earth and sky available to me. I want to discover in my lack of motivation not emptiness, but subtle hints of being refilled. And instead of efforting and forcing what is not there, I want to slow down and listen for what is to come. In the words of poet David Whyte, “What shape waits in the seed of you?” I love the sense of possibility in his words – a sense of possibility only found in the fertile soil of waiting.
As I navigate this winter with new awareness, the temptation to revert to old patterns of coping is more real than ever – to jump into action upon any signs of life, to fall into despair when I don’t see them, or to become consumed in tasks that take me away from listening. Yet the awareness of these tendencies allows me to see their limitations clearly, to appreciate their appropriate contexts, and to give myself the choice of what degree to engage in them. They also give me the opportunity to create new patterns for myself, to experiment with new ways of being, to engage with life differently.
As I listen to the invitations in my words, I hear this: maybe this winter is truly for me in that it an opportunity to be born differently – a chance to learn how to wait in a way that has not been my experience in this life, even as I arrived into it. What would it be like to trust that I am nurtured into life instead of feeling like it is up to me to create it? Could the stillness of winter really be this generous? Could there actually be rest in my restlessness? I will wait and see.