Lessons from February

On the gift of growth that comes with wintering

At my house, the backyard is basically The Wild West. Aside from installing a shed to store the lawn tools we hardly use, we haven’t done much to it. Most of the vegetation is evergreen, luckily, so there’s really not much that needs to be done. That fact is great, but it also means there’s a lot that’s easy to overlook. If I’m honest, I hardly even notice when the lawn needs to be mowed. For me, the inside domain is hard enough to wrangle. I can hardly get myself to think about the outside.

It’s the overwhelm, I think. If I look closely enough, I’ll see all the little things that need to get done and I’ll feel exhausted before I even begin. It’s why, for example, I’ve only just now – after three and a half years – started decorating my home office. Until now, it’s been so empty it has echoed on video calls. For the longest time (again, three and a half years), I didn’t have a single thing on the walls. It’s not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t get myself to do it. I had a painting I inherited from my mother-in-law’s cousin that just sat on the floor for a good two years because I couldn’t commit to hanging it. There were too many other things I felt needed to do first. I needed to hang curtains, but what color did I want? Did I want to keep the existing rug, or get a new one? If I got a new one, I’d have to pick a curtain color that matched the rug. Plus, if I hung the one painting, I’d have to hang other art as well, but what kind of art? And so on.

Part of the problem is that I got laid off in that room. In a devastatingly brief video call, my whole world shifted. Suddenly, I didn’t need a home office anymore because I was no longer needed. I no longer had a job. The room itself was a painful reminder of what felt like my biggest failure. Before the layoff, I couldn’t bother to decorate because I was too busy. Now, I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I was too ashamed. It’s true, my soul was no longer dying in corporate America, but without the consistency of the career I’d always known, I didn’t know what to do with it or myself. The space became a dead zone as I entered what I now see as the winter of my life.

I was laid off this time of year exactly three years ago, and despite it being the shortest month of the year, it felt like February forever. It felt like February in April when I accepted another job I knew I wasn’t going to like. It felt like February in August when I quit and didn’t know what I was going to do next. The unknown made everything feel like it was always going to be gray and cold, like I was always going to feel lost.

When I got my first few freelance contracts, things started to look up. I felt like the ground was thawing, like I was starting to get my sea legs. But then last February, my mom was in the hospital, and all of a sudden, it was winter again.

The thing about winter is that it forces you to stop. The days get colder, darker. Nature itself goes into hibernation. There’s little else to do but rest and wait. However, waiting is hard in an impatient society, and resting frowned upon. Katherine May acknowledges this in her book Wintering:

We’re not raised to recognize wintering or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored.

Wintering makes us feel like we’re falling behind, like we’re not as productive as the people around us. What we forget when we look at the barren landscape is how much is happening beneath the surface.

As Katherine says:

Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

I remembered this the other day as I walked outside to enjoy the snow that was falling. One of the many things I love about snow is how starkly it can change a landscape. Suddenly, I was looking at everything with fresh eyes. In the yard that I look at every day but rarely really see, I was aware of seemingly every branch of every tree and shrub. As I watched the flakes, I noticed the flower bed on the side of the yard. Emerging from the white were bright green stems with yellowing tips. Most of the year, the area is just a moss-covered wall of cinderblocks home to the occasional weed, but in February, it’s the birthplace of daffodils.

I saw them the first February in our house – the February of my layoff – which happened to be another year we got snow. I was delighted, albeit confused. I figured the previous owners had planted them, but what I couldn’t figure out was how they were growing in this weather. How could anything thrive in these conditions? I hadn’t known they existed and therefore hadn’t done a single thing to care for them, yet here they were, alive and well despite it all. The sight brought tears to my eyes. It was a beautiful metaphor, a piece of poetry, right in my own backyard.

Each year the daffodils remind me that winter is the season that prepares us for growth. It’s a necessary, unavoidable, beautiful part of the cycle.

This winter, I’m aware of how much I’ve grown since that first February. I’ve still got things to heal, but I’m making headway. In fact, I’ve finally started to decorate my office and reclaim my space. Slowly, I’m starting to feel things come back to life.

The painting now lives on the wall instead of on the floor (which naturally means there’s more room for Aspen!).