WINTER IS COMING! and that’s okay
In my ongoing quest to finish my cancer treatments in one shiny piece and then never have another health matter to worry about again in my whole life, I do a lot of stuff: I read books, I listen to podcasts, I commit (and uncommit) to diets, I sign up for exercise apps, I stare at the chipped paint on my walls and at my old rug and decide that if those things were fixed and new I'd feel way better. I take deep breaths, I walk, I scroll, I watch Love Is Blind. I drink green tea. I feel mad about drinking green tea. I want to have chips and candy for dinner. I do it. I regret it.
I go in circles looking for reasons, for fixes, for healing. I go in circles. I go.
Here's what I don't do very much: Stop. I don't stay still in the sadness that is here. And as I avoid it, another wiser part of me sees and knows that this is not the way. Winter is coming and maybe it will be a relief to just meet it.
Perhaps this is why I was drawn to the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, by Katherine May. She writes:
If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.
I am taking this to heart. Maybe I can set down the busy attempts to get something that none of us can ever have (the guarantee of a painless future) and get something truer in return.
Some questions I am exploring (and would love to hear your answers too!):
What sadness, burden, heaviness, or fear are you trying to skip over/ resist/ push away?
What behaviors do you do when you are in resistance mode?
How might you make a little more room for "active acceptance" of the sadness, burden, heaviness or fear?
What "true needs" may be underlying all of it?
