wintering - katherine may

Having rumbled along on high for years now, my stress level has reached a kind of crescendo. I feel physically unable to go into work, as though I'm connected to the house by a piece of elastic that pings me back indoors whenever I attempt my commute. It is more than a mere whim; it is an absolute bodily refusal. I've been pushing through this for

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

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

Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Hallow-een, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life. We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or rep-utational, so that we won't be forgotten. But ghost stories show us a different

You wait it out. And once things are better, you forget the quality of 'it' altogether. That part of you gets cast aside, happily forgotten. Life begins to happen again, and that makes for more compelling memories.

• Wintering, Katherine May, p. 74

I don't mind staying in at all. I realise that, for plenty of people, it feels like a brutal restriction of their freedom, but it suits me down to the ground.

Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, stepping into the garden to see bright stars on a clear night, the roar of the wood-burning stove, and the accompanying smell of charred wood. It is

People admired me for how much I got done. I lapped it up, but felt, secretly, that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping far better.

• Wintering, Katherine May, p. 23

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

In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security somehow, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our