Winter, the most misunderstood season

 

How does winter affect you and your writing?

If you’re a writer, you are familiar with the fact that the seasons are metaphors for the stages of life. Winter is the time of scarcity, a time of stasis, a time for silence, and a time for reflection. The repetition in that last sentence is both rhetoric and an echo of Ecclesiastics. With the dying of the light comes reckoning, and we are uncomfortable with it, but for reasons I think most people ignore.

 

I’d argue that we have misinterpreted the circadian rhythms of life and creativity.

 

When we were children, winter was a wonderland of snowball fights, sledding, and truancy from school when snowstorms hit. We appreciated the warmth because we had experienced the cold. There was hot cocoa, a fireplace, perhaps, and memories. We were ignorant of the menace of time.

 

I don’t dismiss that with the dying of the light, the onslaught of prolonged darkness has a psychological and physiological effect on us. I wish to point out something we have forgotten - the subtle majesty of vibrancy of life that accompanies the season. Yes, it is slower and starker, which is what makes winter so undeniable. We associate death and dying with winter, but I say that is a misunderstanding. Winter starts out white and bright with snow and then becomes dull and gray with slush. It is beauty that ages dramatically in front of us, and that is disconcerting. We see change in other seasons, but it is comforting. Winter is undeniable. Odd, is it not that white is the color of purity and innocence, while black represents evil? In Asian cultures, white is the opposite, the color of death and mourning. Black is black because it contains all the colors. White is the absence of color. Ahab’s nemesis is a white whale.

 

I suspect our difficulty with winter has to do with stillness. We don’t know what to do with ourselves when we experience solitude. We don’t want to admit that certain things we face alone. American culture values activity and results, something we associate with youth and success, however that is defined. The connotation is speed is valued. Age and wisdom are seen as slower, less relevant, and passé. The lack of frenzy denotes weakness and lack of relevance. It’s in the still point that we are most uncomfortable with the season because Nature conspires against us, and forces us to seek shelter from the literal and metaphysical elements. We are isolated and the terror is our own silent scream. Winter makes us feel alone, and we have to make sense of our experiences, in our own way and words. 

 

T.S. Eliot wrote, “At the still point, there the dance is.”

 

For me, winter is my most productive season because I explore the longer arcs of my ideas. I can see the water moving beneath the frozen ice. I try not to take offense when someone says I write genre fiction. No, I write the literature of struggle. At the surface, a mystery is a puzzle piece and the end-game is justice. The appeal is we implicitly know life is unfair, and we know damn well that the arc of justice doesn’t bend because gravity wins; it is bent through sacrifice and persistence. The battle is long, ferocious, and bitter because conformity and self-interest must be overcome. Think of it this way: corporations and governments have acted like organized crime, and they were rewarded for it until people have had enough.

 

Each and every season is a memo: Tempus fugit. Therein is the choice. We can chase all the external validations: the big house, the fat bank account, and checkmark the items we are told we should have: spouse, children, etc. In my experience, the currency here isn’t cash; it’s time. The irony is with success comes the struggle to maintain it in the Hobbesian ecosystem. There is a difference between what you need and what you think you need. As a former nurse, I can tell you there is nothing more terrifying than seeing and hearing someone dying who regrets that they spent too much time working and so little time with their loved ones. The common denominator, the true democracy, is Time.

 

Rather than see the spare landscape as a menace, seize the day. If you are a writer, pick up the pen or touch the keyboard. Write that story, decide on the right word, in the right place. Pay yourself first. Find the current under the river of ice. There is a current and a heartbeat there. It is better to find your song and sing than scream into the abyss. You are doing yourself an act of compassion.

 

Kindness and compassion to yourself and others knows no season.