Wintering

I picked up this book to read in the southern hemisphere summer. 2022 had been a sh*t of a year from all perspectives - personal, work, wider social and political. I had delivered on a major project in September and rather than taking some time to recover, I toughed it out until Christmas and then came down with shingles. I was attracted to this book as a way of looking at how we stop and take time for ourselves and approach the dark times as a positive experience. May blends personal accounts of winter, with experiences of friends, and good advice. It is written in the style of a memoir, with insights and pieces of wisdom that she has collected interwoven throughout. She recounts having tonsillitis in Iceland, dealing with the realities of parenting, and taking up cold water swimming. The main message I got from this book is the need to be more aware of the seasons in our lives and learn how to enjoy the summers of our lives, while preparing for and fully experiencing the winters. But this is complicated in the colonised south, where we still celebrate the northern holidays but out of season for us. So I end up wintering in high summer, unable to enjoy the long daylight hours and warm temperatures. At least a short period of southerly (cold) wind has made reading this book feel a little more congruent.

Calling low points in life "wintering" definitely attracted me to this book. I like the cyclical aspect of the metaphor, its opposition with the notion of an eternal summer that we should aspire to even though it's impossible, but after reading this book, I have mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, I highlighted several passages, on the other hand most of the time the author's sensitivity or comparisons did nothing for me. I felt like the book remained a collection of loosely connected autobiographical passages, comparisons with animals like dormice, robins or wolves, and a few interviews of people who went through their own winters. But it never became more than the sum of its parts.