The sacredness of winter

The biggest part of living is in the stillness and simplicity

I didn’t want to turn 40, because I wasn’t ready to admit that half of my life was over and the other half I had a responsibility to live more fully. I grieved when I turned 40. Now I have settled into midlife at age 43. Photo taken January 2021.

43 isn’t a significant number. It’s the age I turned on January 14, but I don’t mind gaining another year of life experience and losing one of my youth. I’m aware that my earthly existence is waning. Sometimes the way time flashes, I feel a fleeting panic arise in my throat —this awareness that my life is also flashing, and I better catch it. But these days, with the strange solitude of being born in January, I am able to stop running and stay a while, with my thoughts and with the winter hush.

I never liked my birthday when I was a child. I envied my friends whose spring and summer birthdays granted them options for outdoor parties (especially poolside) and loathed the fact that, most of the time, mine landed during an ice storm when no one could safely leave their homes in order to celebrate with me. The best I could hope for, then, was a snow day, which meant no school and blessedly, no homework.

Now, in the throes of middle age, I don’t adore the bleak and long month of January, but I do appreciate its invitation to slow down and reflect. I don’t need some grandiose insight into what it means to be a 43-year-old woman, just some time to sit with my thoughts and maybe a hot cup of herbal tea.

Living in northern Indiana forces me indoors more than I prefer, especially November through February. The veracity of falling into the “winter blues” hits me at the end of each autumn and spills into January. After we’ve stowed our Christmas tree in the attic for another year and ended the strand of galas and feasts, Ben asks me, “What would you like to do for your birthday?”

I used to relish the question as a child. One day, all to myself, all about honoring my life —the fact that I exist and that my existence is a good thing. That I matter in this world. It was one day in which I truly felt loved, valued, celebrated. Now, I seldom consider what I’d like to do for my birthday, because my requests are nothing spectacular.

My typical reply is, “Have a whole day when I don’t have to do anything,” which, I know, is nonspecific. So I might elaborate to Ben, “Meaning, no laundry or dishes or cooking. No reason for me to be ‘on call’ for wiping noses or changing dirty clothes or mediating an argument between the kids.” Ben is always quick and cheerful to oblige: “You got it.” And he does it.

When I am given the rare full day of zero obligations, my reaction tends to move from panic (“What am I supposed to do?”) to boredom (“I have nothing to do.”) to exhilaration. (“I have nothing to do!”) Hours that I can fill with anything have become a luxury I no longer take for granted, as I once did when I was a child. What tends to happen on my birthday is this: I sit with my thoughts, which are always rumbling like a hornet’s nest. And once they settle, my mind clears, I close my eyes, and a picture forms.

Today it is a younger version of me standing solo in a valley floor. I am looking upward at a thunderous mountain not far away, and I am thinking: How will I get there? I’m so exhausted and have no energy left. This thought commonly occurs to me when I am nearing the precipice of burnout in my everyday life, and the accompanying emotion is an amalgam of dread and discouragement: I just can’t do this on my own. I need to rest, but I really want to climb that mountain and see what’s waiting for me at its peak.

In the picture of my imagination, a hawk swoops from the sky, and suddenly I am swept into the air upon its vast wings. We soar together, reaching heights I could never attain on my own. I recall a line from Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,” and I smile in agreement. Hope has come for me in the form of a bird of prey, except this mythic creature arrived to help, not to harm.

It occurs to me that hope is what makes the impossible available in my life, and thus probable. It transports me beyond myself, past the solid footing of logic and reason. Hope is the bird that noticed my lack, the yearning for what is beyond my reach —the Something Greater I have pursued since I was five years old —and it carries me from my dismal fatigue to a renewed inner vigor.

At 43, my zest for living has not waned. In fact, it has expanded. I find that my desire to live enlarges with every passing year. Sometimes I remember four years ago when I wanted my life (as I knew it then) to end. The picture associated with that memory is of me, flaccid, holding on to a frayed rope with one hand while dangling above a treacherous cliff. The sobering remembrance of where I was at that time—hopeless — somehow makes the vigor for living from this point onward more crisp, more vital.

I guess this is what it means to keep going. When people say that, what they really mean is, “Don’t give up, because you have no way of knowing what good things might be in your future.” Even better, “Your life now is full of pain, and pain eventually ends. If you give up, you will never find out what might be in store for you in five, ten, even thirty years.”

All of this essay, however disjointed it might be, is the fruit of an hour of silence, an hour of nothing to do, an hour of quieting my body and my mind long enough to listen to it.

I will probably never love having a mid-January birthday, but at least I can appreciate what winter so harshly, but necessarily, does to me: pushes me into inertia and reminds me that “nothing” can be just as productive and powerful (sometimes more so) as busyness. The fury of winter seems angry, yet it forces me to stop long enough to return to myself. To say, yes, a nap is worthwhile. Yes, an hour of gazing at the sky awakens the child in me who allowed her mind to wander and wonder, and she is my teacher. The child in me is pulling me back into myself.

If my birthday had landed in November or December, even in May or June, I’m not sure I would find the wisdom in what it means to honor a life —my life. Because I would have gotten caught in the din of the holidays or the thrill of planning a pool party with loud music and grilled hamburgers. I can’t do any of these in the middle of January, because there’s really not much to celebrate, or do, once the new year has come and gone and our literal and emotional hangovers have faded.

The biggest part of living, I’ve found, is in the stillness, in the simplicity of eliminating noise and activities and lists. My birthday has become hallowed, because I no longer have the urge to fill it with material things or lots of people or fun experiences. I just want to be alone for a while, listen to my breath, observe the subtle flicker of movement on the stray oak leaves outside my bedroom window, and remember the one thing necessary for a life to mean something, to mean everything: I am happy to be me. I am happy to be alive.