Welcoming Winter
It’s the time of year where everything quiets and draws inwards. Where I live in New England, we had two feet of snowfall the other day, keeping us inside as the world turned white and crystallized in dunes of fresh powder. Bone cold but beautiful.
I’ve started welcoming winter with less hesitation and dread. It’s the quiet season for counseling, after many of our seniors have submitted their college applications. I start to turn my gaze towards neglected projects, refreshing our systems, checking in on our team, welcoming new students, and leading webinars for schools and organizations around the country. In my personal life, I find more ease and rest: Tending my own creative projects, going to the sauna and hot yoga, eating soup and making tea, reading through my accumulated pile of untouched books, and watching endless episodes of Gilmore Girls with my partner.
On my bookshelf this year is “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” by Katherine May. It’s an elegy to the moments of standstill in life—where grief, illness, burnout, transition, weather, or otherwise—asks us to retreat. We often resist these moments, keen to keep going, going, going, wound up in a culture that tells us that our worth is tied to both productivity and achievement.
In one poignant anecdote within May’s book, she speaks to her son’s growing anxiety and disillusionment with learning. It’s worse than she thinks it is, and in a panicked moment, she withdraws him from school. She writes:
“I, who had essentially liked the rhythm and challenge of school, came to realise how many people found school an utter endurance—yet many of them believed that our children should endure it, too, for fourteen painful years of their life. I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content.”
By no means am I here to encourage you to drop out of school or take your kid out of class. As someone in the field of counseling students on their future qualifications, I know the reality at hand. But I also see its fallacy, just like May does. In our constant effort to be more, do more, win more—we lose sight of just being happy with where we are.
Ironically, Gilmore Girls is teeming with these cultural notions of success. For those who don’t know the show, it follows a young mother, Lorelei, and her straight-A, prep school vice president, Ivy-League bound daughter, Rory, in their quintessential New England home filled with small-town drama. To fulfill her lifelong dream of going to Harvard, Rory finds herself peer-pressured into extracurricular activities to boost her resume: building a house for homeless people, writing for the school newspaper, and running for student council. Her friend Paris tells her: “If you want to go to an Ivy, you need more than good grades and test scores to get in…it’s the extras the put you over the top.”
It’s not that she’s wrong—it’s just that she’s doing things for the wrong reason. I always tell my students: Find an opportunity because it excites you, not because it’ll get you into college. Usually, if you do that, you’ll find you’re actually a more authentic candidate at schools down the road.
I’m drawn to May’s perspective on her son’s education particularly because I think it invites us to step away from the conveyor belt we find ourselves on. What does it look like to do things differently? How could we build in moments of freedom, pause, and reflection into our lives? How can “wintering” be a part of our educational path? It might look like a gap year. It might look like taking a deep breath before your AP exam and knowing there is more to life than a test score. It might be finding a career that isn’t about accolades, but feels true to who you are.
“Life meanders like a path through the woods,” May writes. This is how it should be. It’s up to us to realize we’re already on the path, and to pick our heads up and notice how mesmerizing the forest is before us. If we’re constantly already onto the next thing, we’ll never be grateful for where we are. May we all welcome more winter into our lives.
