life path

Here is another truth about wintering: you'll find wisdom in your winter, and once it's over, it's your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it's our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It's an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, passed down carefully

‘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. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a period of humiliation or

Halloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals our need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the breach of fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark

This was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds, and between two phases of the year, when worshippers were just about to cross a boundary but hadn't yet done so. Samhain was a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn't know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold. It was a celebration of limbo.

Our

When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable, and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed, and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air, and spent time doing things that

“...I was a liberal arts major at university, where my research focused on the Japanese language. Specifically, I’m interested in how people communicate. While pursuing my research, I became curious about the use of language in print media. I was especially fascinated by the effectiveness of particular expressions and sentence structures. Ideally,

The protagonist is Ushiyama Yoshiko, a BA liberal arts graduate. We meet her immediately as she is interviewing for a permanent position in ‘the factory’ to a middle manager named Goto.

She speaks very eloquently in this interview about the interest she has in language used in print media due to the research on communication in Japanese that she conducted during her degree, and states how she would like to use that experience in this career.

She also relates this to a lifelong relationship to the factory and its products, saying how she has seen advertisements as a child that drew her to working for the technologically advanced and ethical company. This demonstrates to the interviewer that Yoshiko has conducted her own research about the company, as well as presenting an emotional argument for her desire to work there, and flattering the company and thus interviewer as she does so.

We haven’t known Yoshiko long enough to understand yet whether these claims are genuine, but we understand her to be intelligent enough to go about her interview in such a way regardless, using multiple persuasive tactics in a relatively short space of time. She is also able to pull this spiel from the top of her head, without any further prompting, so we understand that she has prepared well, irrespective of her actual interests or whether the factory really does have ‘famously high standards, both technologically and ethically speaking’.

In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don't ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don't dare to show the way that it ravages us. A sharp wintering, sometimes, would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our life are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of

I'm beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it; but I do think it's instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we grow gradually older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are