Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times

can’t help but feel that I let the stress run so far out of control that it has begun to eat away at me; that I should have asked for help sooner. But then stress is a shameful thing, a proclamation of my inability to cope. I am slyly pleased that I have pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my own overwhelmedness. It feels mor

anyway. At moments like this, sleep feels like falling; you sink into luxurious blackness only to jolt awake again, staring around at the darkness as if you might divine something in the grainy night. The only things I could find were my own fears: the unbearable fact of his suffering, and the terror of being left to survive without him.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It 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.

I often turn to children’s books at times like these, when I’m yearning to escape into a world that is beautifully rendered and complex, and yet also soothingly familiar.

I was always aware that I was flying in the face of polite convention in doing this, and that the times when we fall out of everyday life remain taboo. We’re not raised to recognise wintering, or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too great

In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of hysterec

Somewhere in the middle of this catastrophe, a space opened up. There were hours spent driving from home to the hospital, from hospital to home; sitting by the side of H’s bed while he dozed; waiting in the canteen while the ward rounds took place. My days were simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and

I realise, suddenly, how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia.

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.