Resolutions and timing
Winter may be the wrong season to launch
Maybe you’ve decided to make a big splash in 2023. Go big or go home. This is the year, the moment, the thing you want to do has met the time to do it. Or you’ve opted out and feel a tense, if not angry, relationship with the world of resolutions. Some guy jogging shirtless is giving you a lecture about how you shouldn’t sleep in, and he’s made you dislike everything about yourself, but you dislike him even more. I get it.
People have decided a new calendar being nailed up is the perfect moment to grab life by the horns, and it’s mostly bad timing.
We’ve taken where the Romans or some guy named Gregory decided a year starts and made it our starting line while ignoring the reality of nature. At least the reality I live in the Northeast.
It’s winter. Things slow to a crawl. Things go into hibernation. A steady round of colds and cases of flu puts us back in touch with the inconvenient truth we’re human.
Outside, the sky turns to a gauzy, uncommitted gray, and can’t decide if it wants to be daytime. And if daytime, it seems unconfident with the decision.
The precipitation doesn’t shower down hard but floats to earth in romantic fluff, the air full of falling stars that are gathered and played in by children. From melting piles, it will slowly seep to the roots that need it, but it’s taking its time like everything else.
The woods go silent like an apartment being turned over for the new tenants of spring. Bare naked limbs reach toward the dusk that sets in before the dinner plates are cleared.
What are we told to do? Challenged? If you’re anyone that matters, you go hard. Don’t let off the gas. Start something uber challenging with no off days.
If we live by the Roman calendar, sure. But if we are in step with the entire cycle of our biological reality, it’s a mismatch. We’re racing while the world is stalled. This misalignment is a falsehood we’ll ignore for most years. The bustle of energy isn’t set by natural rhythms around us but primarily by marketing and a calendar that is our taskmaster for the rest of the year.
Even if we succeed at whatever we’re resolved to do, we might miss the benefit of living in the rhythms of nature. Those rhythms have undeniable spiritual, emotional, and relational parallels. Parallels that we also try very hard to deny. Rehearsing them with nature each year might help us map the timeline on to all the other things in our lives.
Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times reframes winter as necessary, vital, and something we can honor as we become more authentic residents in reality.
“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 that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising 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.”
The nap that motivational speakers will make you feel guilty for having has as big of a health benefit as flipping tires at the local gym. I see those Crossfitters, and it usually reminds me to renew AAA.
May writes:
“Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”
I’m not trying to talk you out of starting something new; no one is more challenged by the concept of winter having value than me. I make no secret of my utter disdain for cold and the drear of winter. But I get much of what it is, like most things, wrong.
Even snowflakes themselves.
The term ‘snowflake’ is a diss. It’s used to insult someone showing delicateness or anything bordering on sensitivity or an inflated sense of uniqueness. But it’s not the insult people think it is.
Snowflakes are gorgeous in their unique design. Every one of them is the most incredible temporary art piece we’ll ever see. Coming together in large groups, they can grind a city to a halt. They can’t be ignored. Try driving after a few billion trillion have fallen. They are individually intricately designed, collectively forceful, and wildly unique. Call me a snowflake, please. Besides, real life feels more like a wistful haphazard falling than some missile-like precision.
All this to say, winter’s slowdown might be the pause on our aspirations that we need—just a thought. OR, you know what, take over the world like the Romans. Spoiler alert: it didn’t last forever. Even as a guy who dutifully follows the voice of my GPS, I’m not sure using the roadmap that sent the Romans off a cliff is a great idea.
Maybe use this time to go inward. Give some thought to what is giving you life. Decide what to commit to and what to let go. And then, when all the world thaws and the rhythm of nature invites you forward, take off.
Be well Feral Souls.