Season 4 Episode 6: Rest: Wintering
A conversation with Katherine May, author of the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, about offering ourselves grace through the difficult, dark periods of life.
Have you ever been through a period of your life where you felt like nothing was going right? And during that period, did you think: "Oh my god, what is WRONG with me?? I have to get out of this as fast as I can!!" Well, Nancy's been there. But after talking with Katherine May, author of the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, she learned that these difficult, dark periods are just a part of life. And it's the grace that we show ourselves as we get through them, that really matters.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Nancy's personal relationship with wintering.
Nancy's journey to accept wintering as an important stage of life.
Nancy's conversation with author Katherine May about the importance of rest in difficult times.
Tips for folks with HFA who may be going through a winter themselves.
Learn more about Katherine May:
Buy Katherine's book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times on her website,
Pre-order her forthcoming book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, out in March 2023.
Listen to Katherine's podcast, The Wintering Sessions, wherever you get your podcasts.
Follow Katherine on Twitter @_katherine_may_
+ Read the Transcript
Nancy Jane Smith: Hey, guys. It's me, Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to The Happier Approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. I am. So excited about today's episode, which might sound funny because it's all about those times in life that can feel like you're going 10 rounds with a bout of bad luck when all you can do is hunker down, wait it out, and try to give yourself some grace to rest and move at your own pace.
For this episode, I talked with Katherine May, author of a book all about those walking through the valley moments called Wintering. She helped me to see those hibernation times in a whole new light. Not a cheery Christmas tree light, but maybe like a flickering campfire. Her approach to the idea of wintering honors the difficulty of those dark times while acknowledging the fact that they do eventually come to an end, and that, to me, felt kind of radical.
When we were brainstorming guests for this season about rest. I wanted to talk about resting as a form of social change as we tossed around ideas. Katherine May's book, Wintering, came to the forefront. Not because Katherine May is a big social change agent but because her book is radical. Wintering, as Katherine May describes, it is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.
Everyone winters throughout their lives. I know many people in my life who are wintering being sandwiched between preteen kids and aging parents, surviving the early months of blurry-eyed exhaustion with a newborn. Or dealing with a job setback that throws everything into question. Before I interviewed Katherine, I read her book.
I loved the book. I related to it on so many levels. I laughed out loud and got tears in my eyes. Remembering past winters I'd experienced. After reading it, I did what I always do when I finish a book, go to Amazon and see what the reviewer said. I do this to see if I agree with the reviewers or to see if there's anything else I can learn from the book.
Of course, there were people like me who loved the book, and of course, some people didn't like the book, but I was shocked by why they didn't like the book. The reasons fell into one of two camps. Reason. She was privileged for daring to winter and reason. Her reasons for wintering weren't bad enough. Of course, my Monger got ahold of me for a brief moment saying, well, of course, you loved the book.
“You are privileged, and you're soft. So, of course, you think everyone should winter, but everyone needs to suck it up and quit being babies.”
Geez, Monger. Even though the Monger's voice was strong in my head, I knew there was more to wintering. That's why I couldn't wait to talk with Katherine May herself.
Nancy Jane Smith: Oh, I am so excited to talk to you today.
Katherine May: It's really fun. Do you know what? I was just thinking. It's been ages since I did a podcast interview. I've been having a little break over the summer, so this is so nice. Nancy Jane Smith: Welcome back to the world of podcast interviewing, Woohoo. This is Katherine May. She's many things, an author, a podcaster, a mom, and a former school.
Katherine May: Oh my goodness. I have had the most windy, divergent career path possible. I worked in branding for a while, and then I did some hilarious temping jobs, including, uh, working in a nursing agency that was based in a former mortuary. Oh, that was quite an exciting one. Then I became a high school teacher for a while.
And after that, I worked in various sort of arts education settings and gradually transitioned into becoming a full-time writer. That's awesome. It didn't feel awesome at the time. It felt like raw chaos, to be honest. I'm going to lie to you. It was not. It never felt like, uh, very directional, let's say when other people were beginning to save for pensions and things, I was in despair.
Nancy Jane Smith: Like I would, I think, oh, that's awesome. You've had all these different experiences. You've been in a variety of places you really got to to get to know yourself in a variety of ways. And just like, you know, reading the book, ah, wintering is amazing, and we all need to winter and da, da, da, da, da. But my. It's not amazing.
Yeah, I mean the concept is amazing, but the process sucks.
Katherine May: I know. It's really funny actually because you can always tell when someone who's interviewing me hasn't read the book because they'll either say, so Katherine, what are your tips for, like getting through wintering really fast? Or they'll say, so Katherine, you think it's great during the winter.
I'm like, no, no, no. None of those things. No, it's absolutely terrible. And. Like, I think it's really time that we started to have that frank conversation about terrible times being terrible and just to let that sit for a while.
Nancy Jane Smith: Katherine is totally right. When I have dark moments in my life, I feel like I need to get through them as fast as. I never think about the fact that I've actually been conditioned to keep my head down and to not acknowledge how difficult my suffering is.
Katherine May: We don't have the patience to let people say, I'm having a terrible time.
And not to immediately pick up with, oh, but you are learning so much. Or, oh, but actually looking on the bright side, ah, no, it's fine. Like terrible times are terrible, and suffering is not relative. Like when we are suffering. We're just engaged in suffering. We're not thinking, oh, this is ameliorated by knowing that someone else is, you know, losing a leg while I'm just losing a toe.
I think we're in such a hurry, and we're so afraid of looking weak that we, we really struggle to say, this is just awful.
Nancy Jane Smith: Sitting with those challenging feelings, acknowledging the difficulty of those dark, That's what Katherine's book Wintering is all about. But it took a brush with the concept to make her realize that she had a lot to say on the subject.
Katherine May: Sitting in a bar with a friend one night, and she was talking about her life at that moment, and she was just, you know, in, in a lot of despair, honestly, like a lot of things weren't going right for her and. She started saying, like, kind of, that's, that's it. I'm done. I've failed everything. And I had this moment of clarity when I thought, I can see the shape that your life is in and where you are, like in the, in the scheme of things, you know, you're, you are in the dip.
But, but that's just a very specific place. And I, I was a little, uh, tipsy, but I start saying, you're just wintering at the moment. Like, Honestly, this is fine. Like this is just where you are. This is not over. This is just the phase of your life that you are in very specifically, and I recognize it so well.
Um, and of course, I had to go straight home and take notes about it.
Nancy Jane Smith: Katherine borrowed the term wintering from a poem by Sylvia Plath. Go read it. It's dark but amazing, but it gave the term her own spin based on her own experiences with winter.
Katherine May: So wintering is a natural kind of metaphor for the times in life when we feel frozen, so we might feel, uh, blocked from progress.
We might feel hopeless; we might feel cut off from the rest of the world. I make the point in the book that it's a really vile time. It's a really unpleasant, horrible time in our life, but it's also a time. When everything stops and therefore we get to reorient ourselves again.
Nancy Jane Smith: Katherine also uses the landscape of winter snow, burrowing trees encased in ice throughout the book as a metaphor and backdrop for the concept of wintering.
Katherine May: The book is really a deep dive into my love of winter and all the beautiful things that happen in that frozen landscape and how that can apply to human life too, and how even in the most desperate, difficult times, We are still living life to its fullest extent, and there is value in that time. There is definitely a process going on that maybe we can't read at that moment, but ultimately we can look back upon it and see how much it gave us.
Nancy Jane Smith: So it's funny, I just had a conversation with my nephew recently where he was talking about how much he hates summer and loves winter. Ah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I. I'm almost 50, and I just admitted that. I was like, you're right. I don't love it; I love winter way more than summer. And there was so much shame for me.
Which is so bizarre because everyone's like summer, summer, summer, summer. Yeah. And so the fact that then when I read how much you loved winter too, I was like, ah, I'm not alone in this. What is it? What is it you love about?
Katherine May: I, there are so many things I love about winter. I think it's partly a reaction to the hot weather. Like I'm very uncomfortable in hot weather. I find it very hard to think straight. I find it hard to get anything done, so when winter comes, it always feels like a relief to me. I think it feels like a gentler season than summer.
I love the cold, crisp days. I love snow. I enjoy rain quite a lot, if I'm completely honest. I love frost. I love the sight of bear trees. Visually. I find it really fulfilling and sustaining, um, in a way that I find summer very bland and over bright and sort of bleached.
Nancy Jane Smith: Katherine, like me, also loves the things we do in the winter, restorative preparative, cocooning-type activities.
Katherine May: I love the feeling of snuggling into your own house and making a cozy space. I'm, I live for sweater weather. I love chunky socks. You know, I love candlelight on dark afternoons. I love soup. Um, I love baking cakes and making jam from all the wonderful things you can pick in the autumn. I just think it's actually an incredibly restorative season.
Uh, and the kelts called it, you know, the dark half of the year, and they characterized it as gestational, which I think is such a perfect way to think about winter, whereas summer is all about production and newness and like busyness. Winter is about brewing the next thing, like sitting quietly and getting ready for the next phase in your life, whatever it is.
And I find that really exciting.
Nancy Jane Smith: It's such a great idea of, um, the rest, the dormant period of winter that underneath the surface of winter, nature is preparing for the next thing. Yeah.
Katherine May: And I, I think the way that I think about it is it's. Part of the way that the year finds balance, like it, it's not the same all year round.
There are times when we are going out into the world, and we are full of energy, and we are ready to make change and generate new ideas and maybe work really hard in order to get things done. And there are times when we are resting and thinking and reflecting and evaluating, and both are necessary.
That's the thing like I can't get rid of summer no matter how hot and sticky I get at the same time like I need my winters. It is like a crazy graph that goes up and down like a rollercoaster. It's not a straight line. But that's so fundamentally human, isn't it? We're not the same all the time. We don't have the same needs across our lives and across our years.
And when I think about winter now, I just think about it as a phase that we pass through, and, it is limited, and that's what's important to remember. Like whether you love it or you hate it. Mm-hmm. , uh, it's fleeting as everything else is.
Nancy Jane Smith: So the theme of this season for this podcast is rest, which is why I wanted to chat with you because wintering is a time of rest, obviously. Yeah. But it's that permission to rest. How did you finally give yourself permission to rest, or, you know, how does that play into this?
Katherine May: Well, so here's the thing. If you don't learn to rest, rest visits you. And it does it forcibly like you will be rested. You know, and I think that's what we don't fully understand when we talk about rest, is that actually.
To do it when it's chosen is to catch something early because all around me, people are making themselves sick through overwork, through endless care, and pressure and completely unsustainable lifestyles. And when people drop out from those lifestyles, we tend to think that they have like failed personally.
And we don't think about the system that they exist in that just doesn't ever give them a break. And so, uh, rest is really catching sickness early. Like that's, that's how we should think about rest. Mm-hmm. rest isn't that picture that we think we understand. You know, like you get a picture in a magazine that's about rest and it's a woman in like past colors and yoga leggings and maybe a little bit of cashmere perhaps.
And she's got like a cup of herbal tea and she's reading a magazine and she's sitting on the sofa with her feet up looking blissful.
Nancy Jane Smith: Well, I don't know about you, but for me, rest definitely doesn't look like a picture in a knitting magazine that makes it seem like there's only one way to rest. And Katherine says that's totally not true.
Katherine May: I can't rest like that. That's not how I rest. I am a very fidgety person and I rest in motion so too, for me to rest, I'm changing what I'm doing. I'm changing action. I'm changing the way I think about what my day is, you know, so I will rest by cooking a big meal or by actually like, I love cooking to store, like I love cooking, like chutneys and jams and pickles, and.
Big batches of things to put in the freezer. For me, that's really restful. Mm-hmm. , because I'm going through a completely different process to the normal process of my day and I'm. I'm moving, I'm moving my hands, which is easing tension in my body and it's soothing my central nervous system. Mm-hmm. That's rest. Mm-hmm. Right? There are many, many other ways that you might rest. Like I rest by swimming, I rest by, uh, walking. It's not passive rest. It's not a simple bodily stoppage.
Nancy Jane Smith: Katherine reminded me that rest is something you actively have to take time for. Like she said, it's not some passive state.
It's a choice, but I know firsthand how hard it is to prioritize when the world is screaming at you to go, go, go.
Katherine May: I just think it's so important for us to know. It won't just happen naturally if we don't make space for it in our days. And I say that in full acknowledgment of how hard that is, but that's why it's important to think about this on a societal level rather than individual level, because otherwise we turn rest into this like special luxury that only some people can have because they're essentially rich enough to have it right.
They buy the space to rest in. Mm-hmm. And if we start to see it as like a fundamental human need, then we can really start talking about how rest is something we provide on a communal basis and something that we make space for others so that they can make space for us to rest as well. Like it becomes integrated in what we do because no matter how we try to avoid it or brush.
Nancy Jane Smith: The need to rest, even the cycle of wintering, is always going to catch up with you.
Katherine May: And it just isn't as optional as we would like to believe. That's the truth of this. Like bad things will still happen to you no matter how hard you work or how hard you plan, or how aggressively you defend the space around your busyness.
And how pure and great and important that makes you, it can come crashing down in an instant, and we need to show so much more compassion to the people for whom that is a reality, but we also need to look at our own lives and think about how we can build in space to rest if we need to, but also to, acknowledge that it might not work out for us in the way that we're we're hoping, but building that space is really hard.
Nancy Jane Smith: That's part of what makes this wintering idea so radical. It goes against everything that society tells us about how we should act.
Katherine May: Western societies in general, are up to our eyeballs in stress, and we know just how sick stress makes us. And it, it seems to me that in the last 20 years, maybe our culture has adjusted to that, but it's adjusted to it by saying, okay, you need to do this stuff that makes you superhuman, and then it's going to be okay.
So you have to eat these foods and exercise in this way, and you must also meditate twice a day. And you must also, right? Like all this massive list of things, you're supposed to do. And a, it's like impossible to fit all of that in. But what that means is that it doesn't stop anyone from aging or getting sick.
What it does is it makes us feel much worse about those things happening to us because we think there's been a flaw in our behavior. Mm-hmm, and it makes us. Prone to when it happens to someone else, looking at them and trying to work out the reason that they got it wrong, like trying to figure out what mistake they made so that we can't make it.
And that adds to the stress and anxiety loop. Um, but it also is just such a hard way to live, honestly. It is such a hard, unpleasant, me-minded way for us to be forced to live. I think what people don't always realize is that, yeah, I am actually saying something quite radical. It's not as gentle as it maybe sounds.
Yeah. There we go. And every day, every now and again, you see that land on someone, and they're like, Ooh, ooh,
Nancy Jane Smith: For me and my friends who are going through our own wintering with aging parents and our own personal illnesses. Not looking for advice from you, but just, um, I would love it. No, I'm kidding. I would love it if you give it, but just how do you have any thoughts on that? Like how do we withstand that?
How do you hold both wintering and living in the present?
Katherine May: It's massively hard, and I think you particularly mentioning like looking after aging parents, I think one of the really. Eviscerating parts of that experience is knowing that that's going to come to us one day as well. We're in that with two feet, almost like we are dealing with the emergency of care and how grueling that can be and how hard it can be too.
Give someone a, a sort of compassionate response when we ourselves are tired and overstretched and worried with also that, that it's mortality visiting us too, and it's, and it's seeing our own future vulnerability. And I, I just think that's a really very particular time of our life. The only honest answer is to know that it's going to be a hard phase.
Like you can't shortcut your way out of it being hard. I think that's the fundamental truth, but at the same time, it's okay to alleviate that for yourself as much as you possibly can. It's okay to get someone else to clean your house while you, you are going intending to them, or you know, whatever it is that works for you.
And I know that's really different for everyone.
Nancy Jane Smith: Hearkening back to something she mentioned earlier. Katherine says that building a strong community that understands and respects what you're going through in these difficult periods of life is super important and maybe one of the most radical ways we can make room for our wintering journeys.
Katherine May: Find the company of other people who are going through that, because that's rest. You know, being understood is really restful, actually. Um, and sharing duties as much as you can is, is restful. Finding those corners to actively rest whenever you can is the most unleashed you can do. And, and knowing that, that it will pass one day, but it's, it's just really hard, and no one can take that off of you really.
Nancy Jane Smith: Because it is the existential. I mean, it's both, but that existential piece, that's a, that is tough, man. Yeah. And it's been cool because a small group of us have like joined and vent to each other because you got to have some support somewhere.
Katherine May: Yeah. These hard times visit us and it's an interesting moment to reflect on how we are going to be at the final stages of our life.
And, We want to be supported and taken care of too, because it's coming for all of us. Nancy Jane Smith: You know, as you're talking, two things keep popping up. Three things. One, I'll put it together. The radical act of this, which you've mentioned and, and the political act of this in the states especially, but also the idea of that our bodies know what to do. Yeah, yeah. You know, if we could just give our bodies permission to have space. That's what I'm hearing you talking about. It's space to think and wander physically and mentally. Katherine May: Yeah, it's, it's the idea of convalescence, actually, which we don't really have anymore. But illnesses don't just. Stop.
And I, and like when I'm saying illness, like I think we can stretch that to, to fit like major life events as well. Mm-hmm. it was an acknowledged transition back to wellness, and we've totally lost that, haven't we? Like you are sick, or you are Well, and there's no boundary in between. Mm-hmm. and that's the dangerous bit because that's when we can make ourselves sick all over. Yeah, I, it's, it's worth fighting for. Like that rehumanizing of wellness and of health and of mental health is just so urgent, and we seem to get further and further away from it because we are locked in this fantasy that we can defeat illness instead of just acknowledging it as a natural part of our existence and, and mm-hmm.
Working that into how our society is balanced.
Nancy Jane Smith: Because so much of what you're talking about is reconnecting with the natural world, whether in the cycles, in being in nature, literally in reconnecting with ourselves and our connection to nature. Like it's, that is radical. Yeah.
Katherine May: And, we are natural, you know,
Yes. Yeah. And we find it hard to imagine that now like, we are natural, like we are part of the biological world, and we function in the same way as the rest of it. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, like when you look at animals, they rest all the time. They really, I mean, my dog is snoring next to me right now, right?
So, yeah, she, she goes out, she does a little bit of walking, and then she's like, oh, I'm pooped. I'm going to lie down for five hours and snore while you're trying to concentrate. We find it so hard to know that we are valuable. Unfortunately, we are valuable, and we are forever vulnerable to something happening that stops us from being strong for a while.
Um, and you know, how we treat people who are weak when we are strong predicts how we'll feel about our moments of weakness. So I think we can learn in our strong moments too. Kinder to people who we perceive as weak, then we might be setting ourselves up for like a better, slightly better future.
Nancy Jane Smith: Like so many difficult parts of being human, wintering is often about acceptance. And listening to the kind and gentle voice in your head when you're going through something difficult rather than the mean self-critical voice. Speaking of that mean self-critical voice. When we last left off, I was reading the Amazon book reviews for wintering, and my monger was unhelpfully chiming in with all the reasons why wintering was for.
Fortunately, it didn't take long before I heard my biggest fan, and she said, this is why you wanted to talk about this on your podcast. This isn't a you problem, but a cultural problem. Yes, it is a cultural problem, and this is why wintering is a radical idea. It isn't about cozy campfires and soft wool blankets.
Wintering is about being loyal to yourself when you are going through a fallow period. When you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider, and that is countercultural, as witnessed by all the critics on Amazon. I know in the past, my first response has been to judge myself during a wintering period, but I want to remember that wintering is part of being human.
It isn't weak or strong, but part of the human. Yes. Some people can afford to literally cut themselves off from the world and dive into their wintering experience, and there are those whose wintering experience might be triggered by something I might view as less dramatic than my own. And at the end of the day, does that matter?
No. What matters? Being loyal to yourself when you are going through a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the. Feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.
That's it for this week. In our next episode, we're going to talk about one of the biggest reasons it's so hard for me to prioritize rest in my life, my rules for rest. If you have high-functioning anxiety, you probably have 'em too. We'll talk with one of my clients about her rules and how she's learning to break them.
That's next time on The Happier Approach. The Happier Approach is produced by Nikki Stein and me, Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by Pod five and Epidemic Sound for more episodes. To get in touch or to learn more about quieting high-functioning anxiety, you can visit Nancy Jane Smith. Do. And if you like the show, leave us a review.
It actually helps us out a lot. A great big thank you to Katherine May for speaking with us today. You can follow Katherine on Twitter @_katherine_may_, or go to her website, https://katherine-may.co.uk/ to listen to her podcast. The Wintering Sessions buy her book Wintering the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Or preorder her forthcoming book Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, available in March 2023. That's Katherine with the K dash May like the month, dot co.UK. And if you enjoyed the episode, stay tuned for an extra special bonus episode that includes my full conversation with Katherine.
That'll be coming out at the end of our regular season. The happier approach will be back with another episode in two weeks. Take care until then.