Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“My days were simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and vigilant, but I was also redundant, an interloper. I spent a lot of time staring around me, wondering what to do, my mind churning to categorize these new experiences, to find a context for them.”

May describes in “Indian Summer” the contradictory feelings that arise when a personal winter strikes. The contrasts of vigilance and redundancy, and tenseness and slackness, convey her loss of control and the sense that she is not the author of her experience, but a player in it. However, her rational self is terrified of the uncertainty, and in the midst of the storm, she tries to analyze the experiences she is having to avoid becoming overwhelmed.

“Wintering is a season in the cold. 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.”

In “Indian Summer,” May gives a concise definition of wintering, as a season when a person is the opposite of all that is deemed acceptable by mainstream society. The conditions of this misery make one an outsider rather than an active participant. May’s use of the second-person singular is a direct address to the reader and challenges them to recognize themselves as an occasional winterer.

“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer. And that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun; an endless unvarying high season. But life’s not like that.”

May uses the metaphor of eternal summer in “Indian Summer” to show how as a society people only tolerate permanent good times. They imagine that if their life does not pan out that way, it is because of a personal failing. While continually feeling the warmth of the sun could be blissful and reassuring, the false premise that life should be always good puts undue responsibility on the individual, who cannot control many parts of their existence.