The Current - How to embrace 'wintering'

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Katherine May, author of 'Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times' offers advice on how to embrace this time of year by slowing down, reflecting and rejecting calls for endless productivity.

The Alto High Speed Rail Project is on track. Expected travel time from Toronto to Montreal, three hours. Next stop, public consultations in your community. Make your voice heard. Visit altotrain.ca for more information. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Taking some of your power back and choosing to embrace the season for what it is can be really helpful, especially if you live in a place with a long, harsh winter.

Canadians, we know a thing or two about a long, harsh winter. From St. John's to Dawson City, much of this country is dealing with sub-zero temperatures under a blanket of snow. And this weekend, many of us will head into the icebox with frigid temperatures, a storm looming. Plug in that electric blanket. It's going to be chilly out. Rather than thinking of winter as something to be endured, though, my next guest says, we should embrace it. She believes this dark season is a time for rest, reflection, and transformation. Catherine May is the author of wintering the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Catherine May is in Whitstable in the UK.

Catherine, good morning. Good morning. I was reading your book yesterday, sitting on the couch, thinking of the fact that where I am, it's going to feel like minus 35 tonight. Oof. You write in this book that wintering is a season in the cold, and I think a lot of us understand that,

but it's also a fallow period in life where you are cut off from the world. What does that idea of wintering mean to you? I think wintering's got a dual meaning for me really. On one hand, I think about winter, the season and the cold, the damp weather, the dark skies that we often really dread, but which actually can prove very important in our lives. And I also think about wintering as an emotional state to a time when we're, yeah, as you say, kind of cut off from the world and unable to take part. And they come to all of us just as the meteorological winters do too.

What's a perfect winter day for you? Oh, crisp blue skies. And, I mean, I love a bit of snow, but we get it very rarely in Whitstable. So I'm allowed to romanticize it, which I'm guessing loads of your listeners can't. How do you make that connection between what we see outside and the slower, maybe more somber periods in our life? Because, I mean, you begin the book like that, but you also, that's a theme that runs throughout this really interesting book. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we have to think historically when we understand our response to winter.

These days we get to turn the heating up, hopefully we're well insulated, we get to put an electric light on as soon as it begins to get a little bit dark. And the problem with that is that we can spend the whole season kind of not really engaging with winter, whereas our ancestors would have had to have changed the way they lived depending on whether it was winter and summer. And what I argue in the book really is that there were some positive things that happened during those times of withdrawing from society. They were very contemplative times. There were times when we repaired and restored ourselves and repaired and restored the buildings and the places around us. I think if we just try to live on one note all the year, even in the hard times, it doesn't necessarily do us any good. winter can actually do us a favor by being so difficult and so isolating. And yet, to your point, and again you write about this in the book, we want to live in that one note.

We hope that it's summer all the time. You say in our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with deferring winter? It means that actually we're trying to live life on a high all the time and we can't live up to that. we get exhausted. And also things happen to us that need to be processed. And I think having a more cyclical way of living,

accepting the world as it is rather than trying to force it into being the way that we want it to be, is a more healthy, realistic way of living, even in those extremes of temperatures. Life does go on in those times. And nature is full of really beautiful examples of how we adapt and kind of grit our teeth through different. moments. You say that we can choose how to winter. How can we go about wintering better? I think first of all, we prepare. When you look at communities who are native to very cold places,

they often start preparing in the summer. They bottle produce, they winterize their houses, they make sure their wardrobes are in order. And once we get into those seasons, I think we can still mark the beats of the year. We can still engage with the changes that are happening and really live through them. I write a lot about ritual actually. I write a lot about the kind of traditional moments in the year like the solstice. We're coming up in, what, 10 days time to the traditional beginning of spring, the 2nd of February, which would have been calls for celebration once and I think now passes more or less unnoticed. And yet we wonder why the whole season feels so monotonous and bleak and feels like it goes on forever.

And that's because we've stopped breaking it up into manageable chunks and finding reasons to celebrate it. One of the reasons why people want winter to be over and done, some people do, is that it can be really, I mean, it's dark, it's cold. But the darkness in particular is the thing that I think really weighs on people. That it takes forever for the sun to come up. Suddenly it's 4.30 in the afternoon and the sun's gone and what happened. And maybe while the day was out, it was gloomy and gray,

and you didn't really see any daylight. How can we embrace those dark days and nights, do you think? I think it is so important to be very conscious about drinking in all the natural light that you can, even when the sunlight hours are short. Obviously, that's impossible in the very far north, but in the kind of areas that we both live in, it is possible to get light in the winter,

even though it's scarce. I think also we can make use of the artificial light we have in different ways, too, you know, really enjoying winter light instead of trying to kind of blast it away with anything too bright. Winter's a great time for a candle in the morning, which is exactly what the Scandinavians do. But we can also let our sleep patterns change if our work allows it. And that's the problem, isn't it? But often our hatred of winter comes from the way that the world of work imposes the same schedule on us all the way through the year and we don't get to adapt. I saw somebody yesterday. I don't want to get to the sleep part, but I saw somebody, it was a little sliver of brightness in a very cold day.

And this person was just standing on the sidewalk, just like soaking in the sun. Oh, that's my people. It was perfect. You could understand what she was trying to do. Everybody's kind of walking around her on the sidewalk and she was just there in a moment letting the sun hit her face. What happens if we sleep more in the winter, do you think? And what happens to our sleep in the winter? Yeah, I think the second question is the better one actually, because if you study people's sleep, letting it transform naturally across the year without any, you know, alarm clocks or anything like that, people's sleep lengthens in the winter and shortens in the summer. Excuse me, I'm obviously suffering from the good old winter throat here.

And actually, what's really even more interesting about that is that when we look back into history, people's sleep fell naturally into two distinct sleeps with a break in the middle during the winter because they'd had gone to bed much earlier, there wasn't any light, and the day wouldn't have dawned until maybe 8 o'clock in the morning. And actually people used this time in the middle of the night as a kind of gentle, quiet, social space or a contemplative space to meditate or pray or engage in light conversation. But we've lost that middle of the night period now because we tend to think when it happens

that we're suffering from some terrible malady but actually we evolved to inhabit the night during the winter rather than to sleep through it. The Alto High Speed Rail Project is on track. Expected travel time from Toronto to Montreal, three hours. Next stop, public consultations in your community. Make your voice heard. Visit altotrain.ca for more information.

This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship, with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at Viking.com. We're also talking in a really busy period. It's the 23rd of January, and there are people who are still struggling with the great list of resolutions that they made at the beginning of this year, and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, and I'm not going to slow down because I have this big long list of things that I want to do. How do you square that?

January is awful, and we've made it awful. It's as simple as that. I hate New Year's resolutions, because for a start the year is a continuous thing. we are the same people all the way through the year. We're gradually changing, but there is no watershed in January. And in many ways, January is the worst time to bring about massive change, particularly when we're thinking about cutting things out, which is so often what we do, we're so punitive to ourselves in January

during the darkest and bleakest months of the year when there's nothing going on. And we often feel lonely, depressed, desolate. I think we should, if we must make resolutions, we change the way that we make them and stop making them from a place of self-loathing and start thinking about what we want to carry on doing right. Because actually most of what we do is okay and we completely forget that in January and instead decide that we're these awful degraded beings who do everything wrong and have to be kind of juzed up into life.

What do you love about snow and the inconvenience of snow? You say in the book that you love the inconvenience of snow in the same way that you sneakingly love a bad cold. Yeah. Here in Kent in the UK, we will get snow for maybe a week a year and actually in the last few years, not even that. And so snow to me is this big disruptor, this moment where everything has to stop because we are so poorly prepared for it in the UK. you know, the least little smattering of snow and all the roads closed and all the trains stopped. And that's when I begin to get quite gleeful because I get to stop too. I think, you know, in wintering I interviewed people who spent longer times in the snow. And of course, the relationship then is really, really different because for a start,

the whole nation is much more prepared for snow. So it isn't the same disruptor. But also they think very differently about how they occupy themselves during those times of relative difficulty. And I think everybody has to find their own way through this, but what unites, you know, either people like us who have feeble old snow or people like you who have truly awesome snow, and I mean awesome in the old-fashioned sort of awe-inspiring sense of the word, is that we need to accept it for what it is and to learn to find our pleasure during every season and not just in the summer. And that, I mean, the second part of that sentence that I read is that it

forces you to step outside of your normal habits in some ways if there's an inconvenience. Yeah, that's right. We see new visions of ourselves in the snow and we see new visions of our communities as well. You know, people start to get together and help each other who otherwise don't make eye contact for the rest of the year. And I think that should be relished. You know, it's not a crisis in terms of something truly terrible happening. It's a crisis of inconvenience and that actually mostly brings the best out in us and four years relationships that will take us through years to come i i love moments like that somebody listening to this might be mistaken in thinking that when winter comes you just buckle down you're not

leaving the house you're staying that's not the case tell me a little bit about all-weather swimming and why you decided to go swimming in the depths of winter and the ice and snow who knows is the answer to that but i i do make a practice of getting outside as much as possible in the winter. It never seems that appealing, particularly if it's raining. I think that's the worst one. But mostly we can endure the sort of slightly grottie weather.

But yeah, when I was writing wintering, I began to do the thing that I'd always meant to do when I'd moved to the sea. I'd spent 15 years thinking I'd swim through every winter and had never once done it. But because I was writing a book about it, I thought, oh, I'd better tackle this. And I found enormous joy in it.

It's really, it's not for everybody. not everybody feels like doing it. But I think many of us are drawn to it because we want to understand how we can get our bodies into those difficult landscapes all year round. And actually swimming in cold water

gives you this extraordinary natural high which then sees you through the rest of the day. It's joyful and it's something that I am kind of evangelical about but only for people that want it. It shouldn't be forced on people, you know. It's not improving. It's just fun.

What does it feel like? It feels delicious. As you get in, it's difficult, and I still always feel that kind of resistance as I'm approaching the water. But once I've got in and taken that first breath, there's this thrill of being in somewhere that feels so hostile and so impossible. And actually, it takes you a little while to feel cold, particularly as you get a more used to it. And instead you're immersed in this really beautiful landscape. The texture of the water

really changes as well during the winter. It gets kind of thick and almost silky. And it feels like you've made an escape for just a few minutes from the every day, which I love those moments. I'm always looking for those. I think a lot of people are looking for those. I mean, the news is really hard right now. And these are difficult times. And you can imagine that there's a bleak. that extends beyond the fact that the days are short and dark in many communities. How do you think your practice of wintering can help people through the times that we're in right now? I think it can give us solace. I think it can build community. I think it can build a sense of resilience because we watch ourselves do difficult things and realize we can get through it. But also it gives us a chance for respite. The world calms down a little in winter.

and we get to think, we get to reflect, we get to plan the next phase. And I think during those times, our compassion for others deepens. I think we're still in contact with the world, but in a very different way and in a more thoughtful way. And we come out of our winterings ready to face the next phase, kind of steeled again for that next, you know, I don't know. I don't know what we do right now, but I do know that. We need to think about it before we do it because this is not a problem that's going to be solved in any simple way. And it's going to take lots of us keep making repeated attempts and keep trying and trying until it begins to go right again. For some people, it's hard, just before I let you go, it's hard to imagine creating that time to slow down.

Because we live in the society where you're supposed to go, go, go all the time. Yeah. One of my favorite phrases is this idea of practicing stopping. and that if you think about practicing stopping, that's a way to think about slowing yourself down. If you had a word of advice for somebody who wants to start embracing wintering today, what would you say to them? I think baby steps, you know.

I think we tend to think that we'll achieve a change all in one go immediately. Instead, practice stopping in small ways first. You know, practice not being busy. Practice not saying yes to everything. practice making deliberate space to be quiet or to have solitude if that's what you want or to walk or to swim, just an hour a week. But the one thing I would say is that sometimes we don't get the choice either. And winterings visit us instead of us choosing them.

And quite often winterings come to us when we've pushed away, rest and repose and the things that we need for too long and ignored the signals of our bodies and then we will get sick. and I think the art is to avoid winter coming to you, come to winter first and willingly, and it will be gentler. I love this book, and I think it's very useful, but it's also just a beautiful read. I think people will turn to it in a moment like this with winter whipping around and swirling around

and doom-filled forecasts for many parts of this country. Catherine, thank you very much. Stay warm and good to talk to you. Thank you so much. Catherine May is the author of Wurlingerner. wintering the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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