relationships

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

In twenty-first-century Britain, we've linked singing with talent, and we've got that fundamentally wrong. The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our heart soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows

Let us not aspire to be like ants and bees. We can draw enough wonder from their intricate systems of survival without modelling ourselves on them wholesale. Humans are not eusocial; we are not nameless units in a super-organism, mere cells that are expendable when we have reached the end of our useful lives. The life of a sociable insect has

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 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