Joy in a Pandemic Winter
This year, I haven’t noticed the cold
Living in Colorado, winter is a yearly staple of life. We may be lucky enough to avoid sub-zero temperatures most of the time, and we still get plenty of sunlight, but these concessions do not stop winter from feeling like a dismal, dark, unnecessarily long 7 months of the year. The cold and ice begin to feel like a personal adversary in all aspects of life: increasing traffic, squeezing the daylight hours from both ends for darker and darker days, making trips around town icier, adding that extra layer of personal effort anytime you need to leave the house. In my house, it’s not uncommon to hear “frozen hellscape” mumbled under a scarf before squeezing out of the door quickly to keep the heat in.
But this year I am not feeling the mental weight of the winter. I’ve scraped off my car without cursing, I have pulled on gloves and a coat to walk less than a block up the street, stomped off snow upon return, and not had a second thought.
Maybe many people have no strong reaction to winter. Maybe this whole time they’ve seen it the way I’m just beginning to see it.
And maybe your “winter” is not my winter — maybe your winter is gathering yourself to do laundry this week, or making your morning commute, or sitting at your job, or maybe you don’t like the heat of summer constantly breaking into your plans. Your winter is whatever seemingly external force fills you with dread and reluctance. It is that antagonist in the protagonist story we tell in our heads; the thing that if it did not exist, we’re sure life would be a bounty of joy.
Why this year, then, in the middle of a pandemic and facing the hardest months yet (largely because of winter’s arrival), would the burden of winter feel less? Ostensibly, winter itself has not changed, at least not for the better. The foe of winter, I am now forced to admit, exists mostly in my head.
After all, it’s not the morning commute that is frustrating, it’s waiting an extra hour to get somewhere we don’t want to be. Waiting that same hour, moving the same snail’s pace on the freeway, squinting as the sun pierces the only inch of the windshield the visor can’t cover…all of that is nothing if the end of the journey is a concert we want to see, a breakfast we’re dying to have, or a connection we are excited to meet.
To put it another way, we’d go over the river and through the woods to get to grandmother’s house, would we do the same for our conspiracy theorist uncle?
This winter has forced me to face my mental barrier not only in spite of the pandemic, but largely because of it. There are a few guideposts the pandemic has provided to give us this freedom.
(Forced) Prioritization
Before the pandemic, life felt like an onslaught of tasks to do and activities one could do, trying always to hold all the balls in the air. The pandemic removed about 60% of those options, and winter has taken half of what remained. Life has boiled down to the necessities, and anything we may want to do on top of that takes a new level of risk management and effort. What balls do you find yourself picking up again, even if they are heavier? What aspects of life have been worth the effort to revive? Which ones do we miss the most that we can’t pick up again? These are shouted hints at our internal priorities and values.
Boundaries
Conversely, some activities have been easy to leave behind. Where we sometimes say “I’m sorry I can’t make it” with a pang of regret in our stomachs, other times we say “I don’t think it’s safe to do that” with a sigh of relief. Some of the walls put up by the pandemic we find ourselves mentally reinforcing for when the danger abates. Settling in after 8 months, we have all had more practice asking for our boundaries to be respected, whether that is turning away houseguests, asking masks be kept on, or just openly discussing risks. Our vocabulary for expressing personal needs has expanded. For me, this winter I am comfortable asking for those personal wants I shied away from before, like asking for the time and the space to indulge in the things I want to experience, to explore the interests I previously pushed aside by accepting obligations I did not want to take.
Finding Joy
One of the most enjoyable corollaries of boundaries and prioritization is feeling joy in the things we have pushed to the top of our lists. For me, after 8 months I finally started making time for writing, I have cut my wardrobe down to the few essentials I find myself wearing time and again when no one is around to notice the repetition, and more than anything, I am attuned to the activities that bring me joy. Where previously the world was available at any moment to provide distraction or push an idea about what you “should” do or become, the forced slow of winter in a pandemic has quieted the many shouting voices. Now there is room to hear the voices that speak to us most directly, to feel the lift of human interaction when we get it in limited doses, to feel the boost of the small things in life (for example, I find it weirdly refreshing to pick out my clothes the day before), and to truly soak up those feelings.
Healthy Relationships
This is the one external force making the winter easier to bear. Periods of extended stress and isolation act can like a relationship centrifuge, separating the ones that are one-sided (where you feel like the recipient of stress with no place to vent your own), the ones that don’t care about your boundaries and comfort (even after you ask repeatedly), and the ones that will recharge your batteries when you need it most. The last category is filled with the ones we will happily quarantine for 2 weeks to see, the ones we will invite first to a zoom happy hour, and the ones we want to be there for in return.
Carving out happiness and life has turned winter into a fact of life rather than obstacle. Do I have to scrape off the windshield to get to work? Sure, but I’m glad for the human interaction when I’m there (even at a distance and in a mask). Does every grocery trip require piling on layers and a gripping whole-body tension waiting for the car to warm up? Yes, but it’s hard to mind when the other end of the trip is a home that will smell like soup.
There is comfort and joy to be found, and now I know where it is kept.
