relationship to self

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

I didn't feel that the two should be in conflict - achieving your potential, and not being completely miserable. Happiness is the greatest skill we'll ever learn; it is not a part of ourselves that should be hived off into a dark corner, the shameful territory of the wilfully naive.

Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that's allowed to

By closing my eyes, however briefly, and resting my thoughts on the core of my perception, I can gain some of the peace that meditation brings me. I have come to think of it as prayer, although I ask for nothing, and speak to no one within it. It is a profoundly non-verbal experience, a sharp breath of pure being amid a forest of words. It is an

I realise, suddenly, how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I'm afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me.

Are they gossiping, or has some morbid discretion fallen over my name? I'm not sure which is

Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you're already doing everything?

The problem with 'everything' is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all

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 over-whelmedness. It feels more concrete somehow. I can hide behind it and say, See, I am not unable to manage my workload. I am legitimately ill.

• Wintering, Katherine May, p. 19

Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but they are essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings, and feel so raw that you'll need to take care

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