In Katherine May’s Wintering, “wintering” is a metaphor for the difficult, quiet, or low periods of life. The benefits of wintering, as May describes them, include:
- Permission to Rest
Wintering gives you explicit permission to slow down. Instead of forcing productivity through exhaustion or grief, you learn that rest is not failure—it’s necessary for survival and renewal.
- Deeper Self-Understanding
Periods of winter strip life back to essentials. In that quiet, you become more aware of your true needs, limits, and values, rather than the ones imposed by culture or expectation.
- Emotional Healing
By allowing sadness, burnout, illness, or loss to exist without rushing it away, wintering creates space for grief to be processed rather than suppressed, leading to more genuine healing.
- Resilience and Renewal
Wintering teaches that difficult seasons are cyclical, not permanent. Enduring them builds resilience and trust that spring will come again—even if you can’t yet see how.
- Reconnection with Nature’s Rhythms
May emphasizes aligning with natural cycles. Wintering helps you accept that humans, like nature, are not meant to be endlessly productive, and that dormancy is part of growth.
- Gentler Self-Compassion
Instead of self-criticism, wintering encourages kindness toward yourself, especially when you’re depleted. This compassion often carries forward into healthier long-term habits.
- Meaning in Stillness
Quiet, repetitive, or simple rituals—warm food, familiar walks, small comforts—become sources of meaning and stability, showing that joy doesn’t disappear in hard times; it just changes form.
In short:
Wintering reframes hardship as a necessary season of care, reflection, and preparation, rather than something to “fix” or rush through. It teaches that slowing down is often what allows life to begin again. We are all just wintering over here.
