Etymology: To winter means to stay or reside in a given place through the coldest season of the year. It also refers to the act of preserving something through those months. Gardeners do their best to winter their cauliflowers, and grandparents winter in Palm Beach. The word was given new meaning by author and journalist Katherine May in her 2020 memoir, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. In her metaphorical usage, wintering refers not merely to surviving a difficult period, but to “the active acceptance of sadness.”  

Meaning: In May’s words, winter is “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” At certain times, often after disruptive life events, the things that we rely on for meaning—our job, our family, our ambitions, our favorite pleasures—can suddenly feel thin and remote. We are left with a sense of having become illegible to ourselves and to the outer world.

Ignore these feelings at your peril, says May. Our inner lives do not conform to an upward trend toward ever higher satisfaction and self-realization. Like the seasons, they are cyclical. Wintering is a choice to stand up and say, “I’m not okay, I no longer understand myself, and I must be alone.” In order to winter, we must give up our attempt to keep our head above water. It’s a brave thing to do.¹ 

It’s worth noting that the condition May describes is difficult to distinguish from depression, and it can be dangerous to attempt to resolve chemical depression in isolation. Still, May’s concept of wintering shares important characteristics with psychotherapy, particularly in its determination to forgo distraction and confront difficult emotions.

May’s memoir recounts a particularly long wintering in which she follows the faint melody of her feelings wherever they lead. She resigns from her academic post, she wakes at 4:00 a.m. in order to read poetry by candlelight, she swims with her son in the frigid waters off Iceland. Over time, with the white noise of her professional life silenced, she begins to recover, like nerves slowly reconnecting in an injured spine. 

Wintering takes its cue not from the social world, but from nature. There, life withdraws during the cold months, conserving energy and preparing for regeneration. It is also a very quiet season. In a snowy field, the sound of a crow landing in an elm may be the loudest thing heard for hours. We all need such a place, from time to time: a place in which there is nothing to hear but ourselves.