We Aren't Better People If What's Making Us Better Changes
“I’m a better person in the winter,” I used to say. Stretching out the lifespan of my coats as far into June as a sun in Texas would allow. Dress for the weather you want, not the weather you have. Dress for the weather you want. Until the weather you want goes whether you like it or not and you wonder how could it possibly come again? I’d peel chunky knits from my broad shoulders and feel beads roll down the small of my back. I wore boots until my feet would sweat and let my hair hang down until it wasn’t acceptable for it to be touching my neck anymore.
Days became unbearably long, the children running from school free as birds, and I was defenseless against the elements. Irritable. Viscerally mad for no reason other than the likely chance of a sunburn through my car window. Blistering skin, too much light, and no physical way out. My tree trunk thighs stuck to my leather seats and missed the comfort of long denim that used to hug them tight. I was zapped of what little energy I already had, the way a hundred and ten degree day only can, and I never drank enough water. I felt like a mopey cartoon, her head swinging low, bad posture, and clown feet scuffing the concrete at a snail’s pace. I lacked all motivation to start my mornings, to shower again, to feed my body, to have conversation, to care for my soul. I was just surviving, and whatever hell put me here, I’d give it back to the universe, because when I’m miserable, everyone pays.
For twenty-some years, I lived under this flighty assumption that some seasons really aren’t for some people. I still think that’s true, but I operate within the notion more healthily these days, I hope. Maybe you’re from someplace else, like Vermont, where it doesn’t get hotter than about eighty and you can’t relate. Or perhaps my kneejerk reaction to summer in Texas is the way another feels about winter in Maine. Inhibited by this restraint you cannot control, retreating or acting out in whatever means necessary until the earth sees fit to grant you a formal reprieve.
I have several ‘favorite’ songs only because of their association, their relationship, with this reprieve. To Build a Home by The Cinematic Orchestra plays in my head still with the same hope of October ’07. Patrick Watson’s falsetto and the first lick of a cool breeze. Typing away under a down comforter and the blue glow of my screen against a dark and sleepy morning. When I felt like it, I’d wrap a scarf two times around until it was touching my ears and walk out into a world that had stabilized after the ruckus of a long summer. I could finally breathe really deep and there was so much to see! So much to observe and to tell about. I could hide away inside after a few short hours of shaded sun and tell about it immediately – the cadence in which the leaves curled and fell to the dirt, syrupy breakfast for dinner, or the lesson I learned from laundry. Laundry isn’t a chore in winter because we don’t live by our schedules then. In winter, we sleep, we engage in quiet hobbies, and we abide by nature’s rules of rest.
Used to, the holidays would pass, and then my birthday, and I’d feel that familiar rustle in my spirit pick up speed. Not in anticipation but regret. The land around me was bursting in green, and while that promised life, growth, beginning to some – to many – I had things in me that were dying and would die. My inspiration to write, the creativity that bolstered it up. The words would become fewer, as they always did this time of year. How did this happen? These longer days and never enough hours in them. What a stark and striking contrast. I resented every expectation that stuck like velcro onto me, and I’d force myself to move at a deliberately slow, winter’s pace (which coincidentally worked in winter but didn’t transfer the same). There must be somewhere I could escape, to write forever on a brisk, energizing evening alone. Our beautiful stories would wither away to the likes of productivity. The thought of that rhythm left me profoundly disengaged. Nature’s rules of rest were upended and I hated doing laundry.
Would I resign again for the next five months, sitting this one out, or was it wise to wrestle on through scorched grass? My body, furling in, knew what to do when prompted. It knew to cower under the weight of busyness and to stiff-arm the obligation to activity. The vitamin D, it seems, was no nourishment to my health. In fact, my pink flesh rejected it and I wasn’t happier in the sense that some summer studies show. Surely, though, there ought to be some way to live in step, appropriately honoring the times that would come near spring’s end. Should our bodies adapt as they’re swept through the seasons, or is it kind of us to let them shrivel upon impact and just lie for awhile?
Two years ago, I came across this small, beautiful article written by Carol Venolia, and I wanted to share it here. She writes about such seasonal changes and how they inevitably affect our minds and our bodies, as they were meant to. I’ve kept it pulled up, the tab on my browser, and I’ve come back to it every season since. It’s called,
A Long Winter’s Nap: How Hibernation Helps You
“In the depths of winter, do you find yourself wanting to sleep more, eat more and curl up by the fire? We often behave as if seasonal changes are irrelevant to a modern lifestyle. After all, in many ways, civilization is all about overcoming nature. But our bodies are evolutionarily old and remember how weather once dictated behavior. In winter, we hunkered around a fire, repairing tools and telling tales that wove our culture. We packed our bodies close and slept long.
Now we act as if it’s always summer, demanding consistently high productivity at work and at home. But our bodies require cycles of activity and rest—daily, annually. When days are long, our metabolisms and energy levels amp up. In winter, we produce hormones that make us sleepy, giving us time to restore body, mind and soul.
And there’s nothing wrong with that cycle—except that we work against it, forcing ourselves to operate at summer levels even in winter. No wonder so many people feel depressed at this time of year!
You’ve probably heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. You might even suffer from it—as many as half a million U.S. citizens do, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. The fact that most clinicians address the issue via technology (daily exposure to high-intensity electric light) and/or medication provides an interesting perspective on our time. But some have noted that SAD’s symptoms have more in common with hibernation than with clinical depression.
Could SAD be a result of modern living’s demand to move at top speed all day, every day—and mostly indoors, disconnected from the sun’s cycles? Could we give in to a bit of hibernation?
Hibernation is a survival strategy some animals use to get through foodless winters. Though humans don’t hibernate, some cultures have come close.
In 1900, the British Medical Association published a description of winters among Russian peasants. For centuries, they survived scant winter food by engaging in lotska—sleeping the whole season away. “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence and quietly goes to sleep.”
The peasants woke daily to eat some bread and drink some water and then dropped off again, taking turns keeping the fire going. After six months, “the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks,” the article states.
In a 2007 New York Times editorial, historian Graham Robb similarly described rural 19th-century France:
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring...Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.
What if we indulged our inclination to slow down in winter? We’d sleep more and demand less from ourselves. We’d be more inward and reflective. I once met an artist who had mastered this. Perusing her work, I asked how she stayed creative as a painter, writer, weaver and sculptor. Her answer:
She changes media each season. In summer she’s out on her deck chiseling a sculpture. In fall, she is reflective and poetic. In winter, she works with warm fiber at her loom. And as spring beckons her outdoors, she sets up her easel in the meadow. Should our lives be any less a work of seasonal art?”
. . .
I realize this is mostly talking about our lack of engaging the winter rightly, and it seems I have an opposite problem, desiring hibernation for longer than it’s supposed to last and then sort of collapsing under summer’s demands until it’s safe to uncoil. A lazy surrender rather than a rightful submission. But the last part of this piece has reminded me often about our inherent creativity. One that doesn’t go to the grave when the conditions aren’t preferable and the tasks are high. But one that feels the sun on her face and does something with it, the breeze at her back and does something with it, the cold, bare ground and the warm, lush blades both bolstering up what only they can in their time.
I like what an autumnal equinox, a winter solstice, produces in me, but it’s the first of July, and I want to hear her offer. I’m fearful I’ll miss it if I’m not careful. I don’t want to be a better person in the winter. I don’t want to be narrow in that the only good, worthy work in me is done within the confines of a few choice months amidst a whole calendar year. I might be tilling the land right now and that feels different than enjoying a harvest from this year’s crops, but they’re both a faithful work and are to be recognized as separate but equal parts. When the fire is out and the embers are glowing, we’ll call it a night for a final time. But in the morning, like the Russian peasants, I want to wake up, shake myself, go out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by set to work on the tasks laid before me.
Our lives are a work of seasonal art, and as trite as that sounds, I believe it. Not just our favorite seasons or the ones that suit us or satisfy our every creative desire. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3). A time for every matter – planting and plucking, tearing and sewing. Seasons are in us and they’re evolutionary old. As long as the earth endures, it says in Genesis, we will have seasons and we have been given the physical tools to engage with them obediently. He who set all the boundaries of the earth chooses us to participate in summer and winter and their coming redemption. In our modern world, we must be diligent not to work against the cycle of activity and rest but to give into it. We’ll put up a fight and it may feel selfish or wrong or like we can’t keep up. That’s okay. We aren’t always meant to keep up. There’ll be dirt under our fingernails and sweat on our brows but there will also be time to gather round the stove and quietly go to sleep – ample time if we’re faithful to the signals of our minds, bodies, spirits and souls and not to the standards of our changing world.
It’s no selfish thing to shuck our sweaters, put our feet to the earth and frustratedly say, What purpose would you have for me this day, this hour, this minute? There’s a time for every matter, but what matter is this. When the words are gone and you feel like wasted space. There will be moments you’re tapped out and sucked dry, pining for the comfort of cold days when we packed our bodies close and told good stories. We need to ‘stay creative’, to change our media in the dead of summer, but we don’t know how to make ourselves useful anymore. We have natural inclinations to slow down or hurry it up but we haven’t mastered the art of indulging these well. Maybe we won’t ever. Our only hope, really, is an Artist in us who does not sleep or toil. Who imagined seasons but is not thrown by them. We are warm fiber at his loom, and he’s letting us loose and pulling us taut as we need it. Sovereign. Slowly, graciously teaching us to dress for the weather we have. And we’re better people under the weight of his thumb.