PDF Summary:Wintering, by Katherine May

Every life has its winters—periods of illness, loss, or failure, when momentum stalls and the path forward disappears. British writer Katherine May calls these periods “winterings” and makes a case that we suffer through them far more than we need to. She argues that the problem isn’t the darkness itself, but that we’ve forgotten how to inhabit it.

Writing from inside her own winter—a collision of chronic illness, family crises, and professional upheaval—May turns to the natural world, to winter-hardy cultures, and to the long human history of using ritual to mark the passing of the dark. From these, she finds evidence that we can navigate our winters with intention: preparing, resting, and moving through hard seasons with the assurance that each one leaves you better equipped for the next.

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What Different Cultures Have Learned About Winter

When exploring how to weather hard times, May looks beyond the natural world to human cultures that have maintained a thoughtful relationship with winter, finding evidence that people can meet dark seasons with wisdom when they have the tools to do so. The Finnish concept of talvitelat, which roughly means “being properly stowed away for the season ahead,” captures a cultural orientation toward winter. In Finland, preparation for the cold months begins as early as midsummer: Roofs are repaired before snow can worsen any damage, firewood is split and stacked, and freezers are filled with baked goods. To the Finns, winter isn’t an inconvenience to be minimized but a fact of life that demands readiness.

(Shortform note: Talvitelat is one entry in a larger lexicon that the Nordic cultures have built around winter. The Norwegian language has mørketid (“dark-time”), and Finnish has kaamos, both naming the weeks when the sun doesn’t clear the horizon at all in the far north. Residents of these places describe the season not in terms of the sun’s absence, but as a different register of light altogether—snow holds onto the sky’s residual glow, giving the season a blue cast. The darkness becomes an occasion for gathering rather than a reason to stay home, with towns leaning on shared meals, festivals, and community events to do the work that sunrise and sunset can’t: holding the day’s rhythms and rituals together.)

The Sámi, an indigenous people who’ve inhabited the Nordic and Siberian north for 10,000 years, show a similar orientation. Sámi cosmology is animistic—souls inhabit animals, plants, and the landscape—and ceremonial life is organized around the rhythms of light and dark. For the Sámi, the dark months aren’t just endured but actively invested with significance: Where Finnish practice readies the household for winter’s arrival, Sámi tradition treats the winter itself as a season with its own spiritual work to do. May encountered this worldview during a trip to Tromsø, Norway, and found in it a model for not just getting through a hard season, but letting it change you.

(Shortform note: The practices the Sámi have developed to survive the winter illustrate what it means to treat the season as its own kind of work. In the Sámi community of Guovdageaidnu, where the winter can bring darkness lasting more than 24 hours at a stretch, reindeer herders pass down a body of knowledge for working through the darkness rather than waiting it out: reading the moonlight and tracking constellations to navigate and tell the time when the sun is absent. This knowledge, refined and taught across generations of herding through the dark season, treats winter darkness as a condition to become skilled in, not an absence to endure until spring returns.)

Transformation Happens Inside the Dark

May draws these threads together into a single claim: Winter isn’t the death of the life cycle but the engine that powers it. The tree’s bare branches, the dormouse’s stillness, and the Sámi people moving through the polar night are all doing a kind of work that may look invisible from the outside but proves essential to what comes next. This is why we should welcome winter rather than fight it: Not because it’s pleasant, or because it always resolves into something better, but because fighting it forecloses the possibility of transformation. The work of the cold season can’t happen if we refuse to enter it.

She illustrates this through the story of her friend Shelly, who contracted bacterial meningitis at 18 and fell into a coma. Shelly woke physically helpless, unable to perform the most basic functions. But the days of unconsciousness had given her something unexpected: an experience of falling toward death and being drawn back that left her unafraid of mortality. She emerged not just recovered but altered—more focused, less frightened, and more purposeful. May tells Shelly’s story because it illustrates how the most profound human transformations often look like losses. The person inside the crisis can’t see what’s being built. Even as the buds are forming, the tree looks bare.

Meeting What’s Actually There

Winter isn’t a guarantee of growth, but a chance to practice being present with what the season presents. Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps and built a psychology around meaning found in suffering, was direct about this. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he notes that many prisoners emerged from the camps not enlightened but numbed, unable even to feel the relief of liberation. Frankl doesn’t treat this as a failure to find meaning—some suffering is just too much to metabolize. What the transformation that can happen seems to require, though, is engagement with the reality of what’s in front of you and how you’ll choose to navigate it, instead of focusing on what you expected or lost.

Psychologist Jennifer Crocker found this by studying parents whose children turned out differently than they’d imagined: Parents who were preoccupied with what their child’s differences said about their own competence or the family they thought they’d have stayed more stressed and less connected. Parents who set that comparison aside and attended to who their child actually was found themselves changed in ways they hadn’t expected. In much the same way, Shelly’s coma didn’t return her to who she’d been. It left her more focused, less frightened, and more purposeful, not because she resolved what had happened to her, but because she came out of it more capable of meeting whatever was actually there.

How to Winter

Knowing that wintering is natural and necessary is one thing. Figuring out how to do it is another. This section covers the practices May developed during her own wintering: how to prepare for hard seasons before they arrive, how to rest inside them, how to use ritual and community to mark their passage, and how to sit with what a hard season brings instead of rushing past it. May is clear that wintering looks different for everyone, but these practices share a common thread: meeting the season on its own terms instead of fighting it.

Prepare Before the Cold Arrives

First, May contends that the time to prepare for wintering is before the season arrives. When you can see winter coming—when you notice the first signs of difficulty, like an early drop in energy or mood—you should start getting ready, not pushing harder in hopes of outrunning it. In practice, May finds that the best preparations often take the form of small, deliberate acts of domestic care: baking, preserving seasonal produce, or gathering candles and warm things for the house. This slow, rhythmic, tactile work occupies your hands while freeing your mind, and these activities function as a kind of moving meditation.

(Shortform note: There’s a reason baking and preserving can feel more restorative than other coping mechanisms: They don’t just distract you while your mind keeps churning; instead, they draw your hands and mind together. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett argues that craftwork is its own kind of thinking. It’s constantly asking of the materials, did this turn out right? Should I adjust? That’s likely why this sort of task can hold your attention for an hour without wearing you out: It asks for just enough focus to crowd out anxious thoughts, but not so much that it becomes another thing to worry about. Studies on people who regularly do creative, hands-on work show that they report feeling calmer and have lower levels of stress hormones.)

The same logic applies to a metaphorical wintering, though the preparations look different. May’s own run of crises offers an example: Before her husband’s health emergency and her diagnosis, she’d already begun scaling back her hours and renegotiating deadlines at work. She didn’t know what was coming, but she’d learned to treat early warning signs (persistent fatigue, a shortening fuse, a sense of dread about the workday) as information. That head start gave her more capacity to absorb what followed. Preparing for a metaphorical winter means building slack into your life before you need it: a sustainable daily rhythm, a support system you’ve already invested in, and enough rest in reserve that a crisis doesn’t find you already depleted.

(Shortform note: Treating fatigue and a shortening fuse as information isn’t just a way of getting a head start on hard times. Physician Gabor Maté, who’s studied the link between chronic stress and disease, argues that when people consistently ignore or override these kinds of signals, the body eventually intervenes more forcefully: through illness. In his account, the people most at risk aren’t necessarily those under the most stress, but those who’ve learned to keep going, tune out their discomfort, and prioritize everyone else’s needs over a quiet signal that something needs to change. Maté’s advice is essentially to say “no” to obligations earlier and on smaller terms, before the body is forced to say “no” on much larger ones.)

Rest, and Let the Night Be Long

Once winter has arrived, May’s recommendation is to rest—not as a reward you’ve earned by finishing everything else first, but as the primary work of the season. Just as the dormouse alternates between deep sleep and brief surfacing, human rest may also be better understood as a rhythm. May’s evidence for this comes from the way humans slept before industrialization and artificial lighting. Historian A. Roger Ekirch documented a pattern across centuries of pre-industrial sources: People went to sleep at dark, woke in the early hours for a period called “the watch” (a recognized interval for prayer, reflection, and conversation), and slept again until dawn.

A study by sleep researcher Thomas Wehr supports Ekirch’s findings: When participants spent their evenings without artificial light, they reverted to this segmented pattern of sleep, waking in the middle of the night in a calm, reflective state accompanied by elevated levels of prolactin, a hormone associated with tranquility. May suggests that what we now treat as a sleep disorder may in fact be an ancient biological rhythm reasserting itself. Her practical suggestion is to stop fighting 3 a.m. wakefulness and inhabit it differently: Get up, light a candle, and read or write in the half-awake state where the critical mind isn’t yet fully engaged. Reclaimed this way, a sleepless hour becomes one of the gifts a hard season has to offer.

(Shortform note: May’s advice rests on an assumption that a 3 a.m. hour spent on nothing in particular is worth having. Accepting that means rethinking how much you value productivity, which may be a beneficial shift anyway. Brené Brown argues that rest only feels legitimate once you stop expecting it to earn its keep. Tying your sense of being “good enough” to what you produce sets up a standard you can never fully meet, since there’s always more you could do. Similarly, Jenny Odell traces the pressure to make every minute “count” back through decades of economic change that taught people to treat their time and attention as resources to be spent wisely. Choosing to spend the watch on nothing is a deliberate refusal of that mindset.)

The Science of the Watch

May’s account of the watch leans on the work of historian A. Roger Ekirch, but some historians argue the case for a single, universal sleeping pattern isn’t airtight. Ekirch has pushed back, standing by his analysis, and the debate is unlikely to be settled soon. But sleep science offers a separate reason to expect the kind of wakefulness May describes, one that doesn’t depend on any particular historical practice. Sleep unfolds in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, and at the boundary of each cycle, the brain’s logic-minded circuitry loosens its grip and hands the mind over to a more associative mode. That same transitional state shows up at the start of the night, and is linked to bursts of creative, half-lucid thought.

A separate strand of research adds a second wrinkle: Heavier dreamers (people who remember more of what they dream) turn out to spend measurably more of the night in brief, minute-or-two awakenings. It’s apparently during those interruptions that the brain files a dream away into longer-term memory. If that’s right, the half-awake hour is doing specific work, regardless of whether any culture ever organized a candlelit ritual around it. The sensation May describes, in other words, may track something about how sleep is meant to function, even if the historical story behind it is less settled than it first appears.

Move Toward Discomfort, Not Away From It

May finds that wintering doesn’t always mean retreating to warmth and sheltering, but can require deliberately exposing yourself to the cold for short periods of time. She developed this intuition through her practice of cold-water sea swimming, which she took up during her own metaphorical wintering and kept up with in every season that followed, not just the cold ones. Plunging into sudden cold demands complete presence—when your body is responding to near-freezing water, the mental clutter of your ordinary life disappears. This attention to the present moment brings with it a form of relief that’s difficult to access any other way.

May tells the story of Dorte Lyager, a Danish biologist who spent a decade trying to manage her bipolar disorder without success. Eventually, she reframed her goal: Instead of trying to become a different person through medication, the real work was learning to live well within her nature. For Dorte, cold-water swimming quieted her depression and, with other adjustments, enabled her to reduce her medication significantly. May, similarly, stopped trying to make herself into someone she wasn’t, and started building a life suited to who she was. In this context, a daily plunge into cold water is less a cure than a practice of meeting reality directly—and in doing so, discovering resilience.

Meeting Reality, Not Overriding It

Cold swims have a scientific backing, though it’s narrower than wellness culture suggests. Scientists have found a real but modest effect of cold water immersion: a brief decrease in stress, rather than lasting mood and immunity changes. A popular version of cold exposure, but one associated with danger, is Wim Hof’s method, which uses hyperventilation to purge carbon dioxide from the blood before you get into the water. Because rising CO₂, not falling oxygen, triggers the urge to breathe, Hof’s method suppresses signals from your body about when you need to come up for air. This means that while cold water asks you to stay present with what your body is signaling, Hof’s breathing technique works by silencing that signal.

This same distinction—that it’s crucial to work with your body and circumstances, instead of trying to override them—runs through May’s account of Dorte’s use of cold plunges. Dorte’s strategy might not work for others in a similar situation: The research behind cold water’s mood benefits comes almost entirely from healthy volunteers, not people with conditions like clinical depression or bipolar disorder, for whom intense cold exposure might trigger a manic or hypomanic episode. But Dorte’s experience does suggest a broader idea: that accepting your reality tends to be the precondition for change.

Mark the Season With Ritual

Fourth, May argues that one of the most powerful things we can do during a wintering is to mark it with rituals: to acknowledge, preferably in the company of others, that the dark season is real and that we’re moving through it together. This is the function seasonal rituals have served across human cultures for millennia, and one that contemporary secular life has largely abandoned.

When May visited the prehistoric site of Stonehenge to celebrate the winter solstice and attended a midwinter Sankta Lucia service at a Swedish church in London, she found in both places the same essential thing: a structure that makes time legible during months when it can feel formless. For instance, the Druidic Wheel of the Year is composed of eight seasonal festivals spaced about six weeks apart, and there’s value in this kind of timekeeping—when you’re in a hard season, you’re never more than six weeks from the next social ritual. You always have something to look toward.

(Shortform note: May’s point about the Druidic Wheel of the Year’s roughly six-week rhythm names something behavioral economists have studied: what researchers call the “fresh start effect.” Symbolically loaded dates—a birthday, a holiday marking the beginning of a new season, or the first day of a new year—give people a sense of distance from past setbacks. That sense of distance makes it easier to recommit to a goal or a way of being, largely because we experience our lives less as one continuous stream and more as a series of chapters. This suggests the ritual calendar May describes is a built-in supply of fresh starts, spaced closely enough that you’re never more than six weeks from a legitimate occasion to reset.)

May doesn’t argue for taking up Druidry or any other philosophical or religious tradition. Instead, she argues for the function ritual serves: structuring time, creating solidarity, and acknowledging collectively that the season is real and will pass. Even modest, improvised rituals, like gathering friends on the beach at sunset or lighting a candle in the dark, can serve this purpose.

(Shortform note: If the idea of ritual appeals to you but you don’t have a tradition to draw on, Bruce Feiler offers a starting point in Life Is in the Transitions. Feiler spent years interviewing people about how they navigated major life changes and found that many created their own rituals. These tend to fall into one of four categories: something personal, like one interviewee’s first cheeseburger after leaving a religion that had forbidden it; something shared, like a gathering of friends to mark an ending; something that changes how you’re known, like taking a new name; or something that changes your surroundings, like giving your house a deep clean. None of these require religious infrastructure, only a decision to treat a moment as significant.)

Accept Sadness as a Skill

Finally, May advocates letting yourself feel sad—not wallowing, but sitting with what you’re feeling instead of suppressing it or rushing to reframe difficult emotions into something more palatable. Our modern culture of compulsory optimism—the social pressure to extract a lesson from every difficulty and to soldier on cheerfully—teaches us that to feel sadness is to have failed, and that the appropriate response to difficulty is to push through as quickly as we can. May argues that unhappiness isn’t a malfunction, but a signal that provides us with information about what isn’t working and what needs to change. When we suppress it, we turn away from this information.

(Shortform note: Other memoir writers suggest that letting yourself feel sad often requires letting yourself feel other emotions, too. In Alterations, Cori Winrock writes about losing one of her twin daughters before birth while her surviving daughter spent weeks in the ICU. There wasn’t one feeling to make sense of because loss, love, and dread arrived together. Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms, about her recovery from leukemia, describes something similar: The end of her treatment didn’t resolve into straightforward relief, but into a tangle of emotions, including grief and residual fear. Together, these accounts suggest that accepting sadness often means tolerating several conflicting feelings instead of rushing to sort them into a story.)

May illustrates the practice of accepting sadness through the crisis her son, Bert, experienced at age six. When Bert became too anxious to attend school, May realized that focusing on getting him back into the classroom would teach him a damaging lesson: that his suffering didn’t matter and that the right response to distress was to push through regardless of the cost. Instead, she withdrew him from school and spent time doing restoring things with him—playing on the beach, baking, and visiting museums—while acknowledging that what he was going through was real and hard. She defines wintering, in this light, as the the willingness to face difficulty instead of denying it and the commitment to recovery over performative coping.

(Shortform note: May’s response to Bert’s crisis—to find comfort first and work through the logic later—lines up with an idea from Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child: connecting before redirecting. Siegel and Bryson explain that when a child feels overwhelmed, his emotional brain is running the show. In that state, no amount of reasoning, reassurance, or “let’s talk about why you need to go to school” can get through until an adult first shows they understand what the child is feeling. Only once a child feels understood does he become receptive to problem-solving. By that logic, May’s instinct to withdraw Bert and simply be with him wasn’t indulgence—it was the necessary first step before anything else could work.)

How Winter Ends—and Why It Will Always Return

The final question May considers is what emergence from a winter looks like, and what it means that the cycle will always begin again. She explains that the thaw is gradual—not a dramatic return to form, but a slow and careful resurfacing. She cites Alan Watts, who argued that much of our suffering is self-inflicted because we insist that life should be stable when its true nature is constant change. If change is the one fact we can’t escape, then bracing against it only adds a second layer of suffering on top of whatever hardship we’re already facing. May’s alternative isn’t to find something more stable to stand on, but to give up looking for stability at all: to attend fully to the present moment, which is the only place experience actually happens.

(Shortform note: Watts argues that bracing against change turns hardship into suffering, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear pushes a layer further, questioning the premise that makes bracing feel necessary in the first place. Nhat Hanh contends that our fear of change rests on treating the individual “self” as a fixed, separate thing with something to lose, when no such self exists. To Buddhists, what you call “you” is a temporary arrangement of body, thought, and relationships, which is always interconnected with everything around it. A wintering, in this view, doesn’t happen to some continuous person who has to survive it intact; it’s just what change looks like from inside a life that was never separate from its surroundings to begin with.)

The cycle of winter is only generative if what grows in the dark eventually comes to light. May notes that though winter will come again, each time you’ll be more practiced at navigating it. You’ll begin to recognize its approach a little earlier, you’ll learn to prepare with a little more intention, and you’ll carry a clearer sense of what helps you through it. You’ll also emerge from winter with the wisdom not only to carry yourself through the dark, but to offer solidarity with those who are entering their own cold seasons.

What Learning from Winter Requires

When something painful happens—whether it’s a mistake you made or a crisis beyond your control—people tend to respond in one of two ways: with self-criticism or with self-compassion. Kristin Neff’s research suggests that which response you choose, not the hardship itself, is what determines whether the experience actually makes you wiser. In Self-Compassion, Neff explains that turning against yourself in a crisis doesn’t make you learn faster. On the other hand, practicing self-compassion enables you to respond to a crisis with a concrete plan instead of shame, which is what lets you learn from your experience.

Neff’s related idea of recognizing the “common humanity” in your hardship—seeing your suffering as something that connects you to everyone else—gives a similarly concrete shape to the solidarity May describes. That solidarity isn’t a feeling that simply arrives once you’ve wintered enough times, but the result of a deliberate way of interpreting your own pain. Approached this way, self-compassion functions less like comfort and more like a skill—arguably the one that determines whether a hard season changes how you handle the next.