A Little Life List: When You Want to Hibernate

Winter isn't a time for resolutions, perhaps: this winter is showing me something you may find useful, too...

Little Life Lists are for the complicated, unruly things life throws at us. I encourage you to write your own, too. With coffee. xoxo

---

"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is time for home."

- Edith Sitwell

The lovely receptionist at the hairdresser came out from behind her desk. She stood in front of me and said, “You know, winter isn’t a time for starting new things. It took me a long time to learn that my body needs this break. Align with the seasons.”

I nodded along, thinking yes, yes I know all this. I understand that winter is a time to rest and rejuvenate. I got it.

But then I paid a little more attention. She talked more about yoga and what she’d learned. I listened. Because while I understood it conceptually, I wasn’t actually allowing for any of that pause to happen in my life. (And I wasn’t at the hairdresser for my own hair, instead two of my kids, before hurtling to sports…)

I’ve written on here before about being homesick, in part because I live somewhere bleak in winter. Snow on snow. Sometimes for six months. And winter is hard for me. This year, thanks to books like Wintering by

Katherine May

, (and an El Nino gift of three milder months out of the six) I’ve worked harder on appreciating winter.

This week, it’s been minus 50 (yes, you read that right), and the air has almost cracked with the cold. Stepping outside, my eyelashes gather frozen drops like tiny, glittery pearls, and the dog lifts her feet from the bitter sidewalk in shock.

It hasn’t just been the plummeting temperatures which have said: hibernate. Various family members got sick, including me, and my usual resolutions and goal setting for January went, well, down the toilet.

Beyond that, I hit a creative impasse. I wanted to have ideas and stories and sentences and write because that always makes me feel better. But my mind was as blank and cold as the prairie outside. Cold on cold.

Still, at this point I thought it was all doable. All the books I want to read. All the stories I want to write. All the energy I need to navigate work and children and my novel and it all. Human hibernation. It might be a thing, but I didn’t need it.

Last spring, we were in New York. I took my two little boys around the Met Museum. We lasted 22 minutes. My almost ten year old lit up in the rooms of weapons and the two of them delighted in the knights and the armour. As we hurtled through the Egyptian rooms, trying to find our way out (because that was ENOUGH and we were DONE), I glimpsed a small female figure sculpted in the middle of a larger dark room. She didn’t have a head. Her body was graceful and described as demure.

Somewhere, deep inside, an idea glimmered. Golden and lovely, a fish in a river, the light upon its scales. Who was the woman? Why was she standing there? Who sculpted her? These are the questions that start me writing, that open up stories and let me begin.

“Mum, hurry up. This is boring.”

“We want to go to the playground.”

And so the idea, glimpsed, swam on. Ideas for books, and books I want to read. Stories I’ve started and never finished. The river flows on, silver fish, possibilities that children and life and work and sickness interrupt.

Winter interrupts.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

If you’re feeling like I have been—in a time where you need quiet and comfort and pause—then perhaps deep winter is ideal for that. Perhaps these bitter cold days give you and me an opportunity to pause. Maybe new ideas and glimmers are lovely to witness like old movies, or like exhibits in a museum, but for the moment it’s okay to stay quiet. Paused.

Maybe, together, we can think about regrowth in the spring. We can refuel with great books and lines like Edith Sitwell’s: good food and warmth…time for home… as the wild world stays frozen outside, an inhospitable landscape, telling me to close the door for now.

Hibernate with me.

1. Remind yourself it’s a season.

2. When the snow is on the ground, beneath the earth secret changes are happening. We can’t see them, but come spring, regrowth occurs.

3. There are more hours of night, fewer of day, to remind us to rest more. Sleep. Seasonality of sleep has been researched, concluding: Assessments of subjective sleep length over the year suggest a substantially longer sleep period during winter.

4. When you do have energy, use it to be creative and playful. That fuels me, and maybe it will fuel you, too.

5. Read. Read. Read. Editor at The Novelry, Tash Barsby, suggested a crime trilogy by Michael Robotham and I can’t wait to light the fire and curl up with it. In this dream, the kids are asleep upstairs, I have a hot tea beside me, a candle. I’m hibernating.

Read more: This is the link to Michael Robotham’s book page. Have you read any of his? Is there another crime author you love? I’ve nearly finished Robert Galbraith’s everything (quite a commitment!) and am looking forward to whichever waters I enter next. I’m also in the mood for memoir, always. Any suggestions?

Thank you as ever for reading. And for your patience. I’m delighted to see new subscribers and paid subscribers all the time and will keep working hard to make this space useful, beautiful, and peaceful for you.

---

If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked. Join me for coffee breaks to look at lines from great writers. Xoxo