Winter doesn’t end with the holidays

Honoring the season for contemplation and rest well into the new year

At the start of every season I create a new Spotify playlist to collect newly discovered and frequently replayed music—a soundtrack to color my days. I named this season’s playlist “winter 2024”, sparking a debate between me and my husband.

“Shouldn’t it be winter 2023?”

“There’s more winter in 2024.”

“But winter starts in 2023.”

We agreed that the clearest naming would include both years 2023-24, but I left the playlist name as is. To me it is a small act of rebellion against the notion that the slow and reflective rhythms associated with winter end with the holidays, swiftly getting swept away by ”new year new me” spring-like energy.

Winter, a season for quiet walks and inward contemplation

New year’s resolutions are believed to originate from the ancient Babylonians over 4000 years ago. Their new year began with the spring equinox, not in winter, to coincide with the start of farming season.

Most of the world now uses the Gregorian calendar, a modification of the Julian calendar established by the Roman Empire. January 1, the beginning of the year in these solar calendars, thus became a widely accepted time to look ahead and make promises and intentions for the future.

I don’t bemoan the Gregorian calendar—it may not align with the seasons, but having a consistent and widely used framework of time is necessary to live in conjunction with others. And New Year’s Day appropriately falls around the beginning of winter when we are just starting to invite quiet contemplation and rest. It can be a welcome opportunity for reflection and intention setting as we invite in quieter days.

The danger of aligning New Year’s Day with new intentions and resolutions is the cultural programming that we have to have it all figured out by the first of January and start taking action ASAP. I’ve fallen into this trap many Januarys in a row, leaping into dream projects and lofty morning routines with fervor. Feeling refreshed and ready after time off during the holidays, I assume that I have all the energy I need to charge through winter.

Every January I began with a bang, then came to a grinding halt by February.

Whenever I tried to extract all my energy while ignoring the slower pace of winter, I would inevitably be forced to decelerate due to fatigue, creative block, or burnout. The recovery process came with guilt and frustration as I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to reliably move towards my dreams. The below comic is something I made last winter to channel this frustration.

This winter I am taking care to avoid overextending myself by listening to the season. I want to meet spring with liveliness and renewal, ready to turn outward much like the colorful blossoms sprouting from the ground.

An occasional sharp wintering would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower.

— from Wintering by

Katherine May

If you too are interested in attuning to winter’s energies, here are some practices I invite you to try.

• Slow down movement: I fell in love with yin yoga during the pandemic and I gravitate towards this slow-paced, inward-focused style of yoga in the winter. In yin yoga you hold each pose for 3-5 minutes, finding your edge between intensity and relaxation. Yoga with Kassandra has tons of free yin yoga videos to try on Youtube. If you are new to the practice, I’d suggest starting with 15 minutes. On stressful days, I like to follow an hour long video before bed to settle down.

• Review and repurpose past work: Winter is a great time to look back on all that you have made, even if it’s not fully formed. You may be inspired to tie up loose ends to past projects or find ways to carry over threads of old work into a new endeavor. One way to do this is by sorting through past journals to identify recurring topics and collect snippets and ideas for future use. You can also look at things you’ve published or submitted in the past. Perhaps some valuable life knowledge in a newsletter post or a rejected short story has only been seen by a few people and deserves to be noticed more widely! Can you think of a new format to repackage and share your work for the world to see?

• Create capacity and prepare: Though winter does not have much to show on the outside, much work is happening inside the earth to bear fruit. What are ways in which you can make space and build up energy for your projects to flourish later in the year? This could look like ample rest, reading and research, learning a new skill, tidying your creative space, or parting ways with commitments that drain you.

For more on following seasonal rhythms and aligning them with our creative practice, I highly recommend

Jacqueline Suskin

’s new book A Year in Practice and The Creative Good’s Seasonal Creator workshops, both of which have taught me multitudes on how to decolonize time and sync with nature’s cycles.

Now I want to hear from you ❄️ Have you fallen into the trap of overextending yourself during winter before? What personal winter practices do you recommend?