vanya
@vanyastar
vanya
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
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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
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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
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Some ideas are too big to take in once and completely. For me, this is one of them. Believing in the unpredictability of my place on this earth - radically and deeply accepting it to be true - is something I can only do in glimpses. It is, in itself, an exercise in mind-fulness. I remind myself of its force, but the belief soon seeps away. I remind
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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
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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
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Being a mother felt like becoming invisible, or perhaps semi-visible - noticeable enough to be scolded for failing to fold your pram on a bus (how, with a baby under your arm?), or for taking up too much space on the pave-ment. But in yourself, now, a slightly detested creature, loose around the middle and contributing to the overpopulation of the
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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
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Life never does quite offer us those simple happy endings. I often think that it’s all part of my own craving: the moral clarity of cause and effect, reward and punishment for my actions. A map for living that renders everything inexplicable. Instead, I am often left with the sense that my best acts are invisible, and that my worst are only
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