Living seasonally, on purpose

One of my favorite journeys through the inner psyche is reading my own musings from years' past. It's fascinating to look back on what was circling around in the mind of my 15, or 19, or 23-year-old self - how she put words to the page, what was troubling her, how she would make sense of it. It doesn't feel like a long time ago - especially given that I started this blog when I was 23 - but so much has changed in both my writing style and the ways I think through the topics I want to share.

One of those topics, and still one of my favorite blog posts was from those early days: An Ode to Winter. In it, I described the coziness of living up on the mountain (still in my parents' home) with a forest landscape that stayed perpetually blanketed in snow for the entire season. I whisked up the image of soft candlelight and warm drinks throughout the day. It was the first winter season I stopped trying to survive through and, instead, something allowed the mindset shift for me to embrace the harshness of the outdoors and create a warm, inviting domestic world in contrast to it. That winter ultimately taught me how to stop wishing seasons away.

What I didn't know then was that it was such a soft, small beginning to a much bigger shift - one that would change how I move through the entire year and even through my own body. It's certainly not a surprise, then, that I still love and romanticize the winter season. But beyond that, I've been able to carve deeper meaning into every turn of the page.

As trite as it may be now to say that seasons and their energies are cyclical, it's certainly easier to discuss than it is to practice day-to-day. As much as I've attempted to turn my own energy over to the cycle completely, I still function largely under the confines of modern living, as anyone with a 9-to-5 would have to. But the difference is in my own understanding of the cycle: I used to treat life like one long, flat timeline. Every day is a new day, and my perception was tunneled in on that fact. This mindset carries the assumption of staying equally productive, equally social, equally energetic all year round - but living with the seasons asks us to zoom out.

When you start to pay attention to your own internal "seasons" - what tends to trigger burnout vs. motivation, fatigue vs. sustained energy, hermit-mode vs. FOMO - you'll likely begin to notice patterns. It's very rarely random, but the modern lifestyle of working for the weekend and keeping at the same pace all the time stifles our ability to feel much below the surface. Here's the thing: Our culture, and often our own psyche, demands constant peak performance. But a peak implies that there is a work-up to the top and a descent back down. Without that structure, its simply a plateau.

Even more so, we're not able to function at that high-point all the time - eventually we will fall back down, but whether it's a timely realization to pump the breaks or a full-blown crashout is entirely within our ability to control, so long as we can recognize the signs of the season.

Winter is the time of rest and resolve, both literally within the passing of time and within our own inner world. If we are in a place where we know we need to slow way down, we enter an internal winter marked by comfort rituals: warm meals, reading by lamplight, slow-sipping coffee in the morning, lighting candles...just think back to that Ode to Winter post). This time calls for us to literally move slower. Maybe we don't go for the full hour-and-a-half HIIT workout routine, and we opt for restorative yoga, or a neighborhood stroll instead. It also asks us to go inward - so it's completely okay to skip out on a night at the club for a date with your journal. This is what our bodies deeply crave and miss when our lives get too hectic - when there's piles of paperwork to do, bills to pay, deadlines to meet, world news to worry about, and swarms of people needing things from us. This is what our bodies deeply crave, in general, in the height of hustle culture. Perhaps this is exactly why the winter season holds such a tender place in my life now - as an act of rebellion.

To round out the other seasons (and you can probably guess where we're going, here), spring is the time of initiation and gentle reemergence. You know how New Years resolutions famously fail? It's because midwinter is not the sensical time to declare and immediately enact a new lifestyle change. It takes time, and the work is still fragile - imagine the tiniest sprout of a vegetable plant in the garden. Its process needs extreme patience, space, and care before it's strong enough to grow on its own. We're still dreaming and planning here - perhaps starting, too - but never overloading.

Then, we reach summer. This is that "peak performance" expected of us all-year-round. This is where we actually have the sustained energy to say "yes" to the club, the girls' trip, the projects, the ways we show up for our people. This is a time where we can be expansive and expressive - our growth can carry itself without much structure. All that's asked of us is that we be present and grateful for the bounty that lays before us, and of course that we give ourselves enough time to work up to this delicious moment.

Finally, autumn, where we reap the harvest and reflect on it. This is a perfect time to share what worked and what didn't, to name the best parts of the process, and to begin tightening back up the routines for the eventual return to winter hibernation. We're not fully asleep yet, but we're beginning to build the nest and get cozy within it.

A newer revelation in this cyclical pattern, for me, has also been to synchronize the energy in smaller ways to my menstrual cycle. This feels funny to admit, because I know so many women who do the same thing, but it's never come naturally for me. For many reasons, it's hard to know where I am in the cycle, so it never felt intuitive to apply these subtle shifts. That said, I know that to do so is as natural as the passing of the seasons themselves. It's been beyond liberating to start noticing the small patterns of my body. I've finally broken the curse of asking "What's wrong with me?" and can instead gently lean into "What season am I in?"

Here's the other thing: This gets tricky for people because sometimes the inner and outer seasons don't match up. Think back on your own life - certainly there have been times during the summer where you've needed to retreat after overproducing at work or attending too many bachelorette weekends in a row. Certainly some winters cooped up at home have been your most inspired, your most creative and abundant. I can speak from personal experience here - this February has at least one event listed on the calendar for every single weekend day all month. I don't think I've ever been this busy at this time of the year, but my friends want to gather and I want to join, simple as that.

Case in point, judging our own internal season is more nuanced than pairing it with whatever the weather is doing. This is ultimately a good thing, because we have permission to move differently than the rest of the world when necessary, and others may be able to fill in where we can't. If only the burden of hustle culture would cease a bit, we'd be able to live this out more tangibly.

But we live in an imperfect world, one that will probably always hold us to impossible standards. So the next best thing is to carve out permission for ourselves to live cyclically, wherever and however we can. That might look like attending a town hall meeting when you have energy to spare and a craving for branching out of your comfort zone. Opposingly, it could be cancelling a meeting when you've already taken on too much that week. All it takes is a few moments of deeper self-inquiry each day,. Over time, we'll start to learn our patterns and learn how to move with them rather than against them.

When I wrote that ode a few years ago, I anchored to the idea of "resolve" to get through winter. I was just in the baby steps of learning how to live peacefully with the darkness and stillness. Now what I’m practicing is something softer. Less gripping, more listening. I don’t have to force myself through every dip in energy or every quiet phase of life. I can trust that rest has a purpose, that inspiration returns. That my body knows the rhythm even when my planner doesn’t.

Maybe it’s early evening now, and the light is stretching a little longer than it was a month ago. I can get home before it disappears altogether. My planner is open, but instead of cramming it full, I’m penciling things in with space to breathe between them. A walk here. A writing day there. A quiet weekend left untouched. I won’t always get it right, but I’m learning to leave room for the version of me I haven’t met yet: the one who will wake up in whatever season her body is in that day.