Book SummaryWintering, by Katherine May

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Wintering

In Wintering, Katherine May argues that the hardest times in our lives—those marked by illness, grief, failure, loss, or erosion of confidence and momentum—are necessary seasons. She contends that we suffer more than we need to during these periods because we’ve convinced ourselves they represent personal failures. May argues that winters are natural: Rather than traveling a linear path, we move in cycles of growth, dormancy, and renewal, just like everything else in the natural world.

May writes from her experience of a personal winter that arrived in her late thirties: Her husband nearly died from a burst appendix, she was diagnosed with a chronic illness, her son was too anxious to attend school, and she left a demanding job with no plan for what came next. A longer history of difficult seasons—undiagnosed autism that left her out of step...

Wintering Summary We Live Seasonal Lives

May observes that every living thing experiences cycles of growth and dormancy, abundance and scarcity—except for humans, in the story we tell about ourselves. But contrary to our expectations, human life is seasonal by nature. We all go through periods of wintering, May’s term for our fallow periods of psychological and emotional retreat. A wintering might be triggered by illness, bereavement, job loss, the slow collapse of a relationship, or a failure of confidence so gradual that you don’t notice it until you’re deep inside it. What all winterings share is that they are involuntary, isolating, and painful—but May contends they don’t have to be as isolating and painful as we make them.

(Shortform note: In calling the difficult stretches “wintering,” May chooses the vocabulary of seasons and time instead of diagnosis. In her book Depression, Ann Cvetkovich makes a similar move: She argues that medical language can [isolate the...

Wintering Summary What the Natural World Teaches Us About Wintering

If human life is seasonal by nature, then we might expect to find wisdom about how to live seasonally in the natural world—and May does. This section covers what she discovers when she looks to plants, animals, and cultures with a longer relationship to winter than our own: not a set of instructions, but evidence that moving through darkness with intention is both possible and restoring.

Plants and Animals Don’t Fight Winter

May argues that the most instructive thing to notice about the natural world is what it doesn’t do: Plants and animals don’t argue with winter, pretend it isn’t happening, or try to keep up summer’s pace. Instead, they read the signals and respond accordingly. Take trees as an example: As daylight shortens in autumn, trees stop producing chlorophyll, the green pigment that turns sunlight into energy. Meanwhile, a specialized layer of cells severs the connection between each leaf and its branch, because holding onto them through winter would cost more energy than it would save. When the leaf falls, the tree seals the wound to prevent moisture loss.

What May finds most striking in the trees’ example is that **the following year’s buds are already...

Wintering Summary 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...

Wintering Summary 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...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Your Dark Seasons

Most of us have been through at least one period that fits May’s description of a wintering—a time when ordinary life became inaccessible and forward momentum stalled. This exercise asks you to look back at one of those periods and consider what it might have been asking of you.

Think of a difficult period in your life—a time of illness, loss, failure, transition, or just a season when you felt out of step with the world around you. (It doesn’t need to be the hardest thing you’ve ever experienced, just a period that felt like winter.) What was happening in your life?