My stomach is churning. It’s making me uncomfortable. It’s a condition that has become so frequent in my life that I’ve come to fear it. I get shaky-feet in time like these; a mild panic that my body is making me conscious of. My mind follows suit, and I become objectively untrustful about my own self, about losing myself into a whirl of emotional pain and gut-churning fear, even if nothing external happens to me.
Humans are tricky animals: what we fear mostly has already happened to us, we just dread the suffering we’ve endured and are therefore afraid that in time, we’d suffer again. We aren’t like cats and dogs, who immediately after the threat has lifted, return to their normal behavior; events don’t leave a mark on their consciousness, if they have one.
I hate feeling like this; it is irritatingly and childishly unsettling, the unfounded and irrational feeling of panic and utter abandonment. But as May recognizes at the end of this book, her memoir about retreat in lean times, such feelings are cyclical. We have to live, not once but time and again, with these uncomfortable feelings and tendencies; we have to journey through the repetiveness of life’s bittersweet episodes.
I came to know about this rather successful self-help book from the booktuber Jennifer from ‘insert a literary pun’, and the term ‘wintering’ as well as the concept it presents, immediately resonated with something I was in dire need of. Although it was during the recent summer that things really got heavy for me, by the time winter arrived, I was so worn down by the unresolved worry, anxiety, and depression that I was helplessly out of choice but to retreat and winter. For this reason, May’s book has been one of the timeliest books that I’ve ever read.
Many a time, I read a book too soon and couldn’t comprehend it well enough; at other times, a book I picked too late, and failed to savor it as fully as I might’ve had at times prior. May’s book found me, or I found it, at the right time: while sulking bitterly within my messed-up life, or rather, my chaotic mind, this book gave a thinking-voice and a gentle push to start talking again, to start thinking again.
More memoir than self-help, in this book May talks about the winters in her own life: the husband’s illness, her own, her child’s trouble with school, her decision of quitting her job as a university lecturer, the financial problems, and general worries of life, and through these experiences she extracts the lessons she learned while wintering. Structured in chapters with the names of the months, September through March, this book is full of stories from Katherine’s life in that particular winter: her Finnish friend’s preparations in the extreme cold of Finland; her visit to Iceland and Antarctica; her experience of sauna and swimming in cold waters; her knowledge about hibernating animals, the nature of fox, the unity of bees, and friendliness of robins (birds).
Reading these chapters, I felt like May was talking to me and sharing all these experiences, and at the end of each tale, she left me with a wise and summarized lesson to help me in my own life. While her life and experiences might wildly differ from mine, the lessons May arrives at are universal in their relatability and impact.
‘Wintering’ also showed me that one thing which I have become recently conscious of: how to process a season, how to talk about it, and learn from what it has to offer. In that regard, this book is a manifesto about the winter season: its harshness that makes us return to our caves, to get closer together and warm each other, to retreat and introspect, to surrender and make ready for what’s next to come.
May ends this book with the same honest vulnerability that she wrote it with, admitting that there are more winters to come, that life’s difficulties won’t end with this book; yet summers await us too, the strength that we’ve acquired through this retreat, has made us stronger for what awaits.
Ratings: 4/5
December 28, 2021_