It felt radical to me, and also like the only idea that didn't elicit an immediate rejection from my mind and body when I considered it.
This idea - that slowing down, rather than pushing through - was the salve. She writes, "Doing these deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - is a radical act now, but it is essential." It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider… However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.” And while my upbringing had taught me that these emotions were simply something to push through, or to work through, May argues the opposite: that in a period of wintering, the best thing we can do is winter. She writes, “Wintering is a season in the cold.
In “Wintering,” May writes about her own experience with crashing into the proverbial wall when a combination of illness and mental health and employment struggles in her family required her to stop and take stock. Pre-pandemic Neema would not have read this book, and was in fact obtusely stubborn about reading books in this genre that Amazon categorizes as “Personal Transformation Self-Help.” But by early 2021, I was desperate for some insight, some alternate path that might lead me in a different direction - a direction where I didn’t feel like my body was going to fail me at any moment. Then a friend recommended a book to me: “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,” by Katherine May. And from somewhere within my body, this deep need to turn inwards came to the surface, demanded to be seen, couldn’t be silenced or deterred.
#Antonym of ephemeral series#
Instead of independent obstacles or disparate challenges, work now felt like a daily series of attempts to ram myself into a giant brick wall of inequity and ill logic - a wall that showed no signs of crumbling. Whereas before I’d viewed challenges in my work as obstacles to be overcome, doors to kick down, puzzles to solve, I found myself less and less able to muster the energy for these fights. While I’d previously found tremendous joy in my job, I now found joy more ephemeral, more elusive. It continued when the district decided to subdivide our green space away from our school for the purpose of building a fieldhouse, but did not meaningfully incorporate student or community feedback in their process. And it got even worse when we returned to school buildings in September 2020 to see that the only ventilation being provided by our school district was $19 box fans that didn’t even fit in many of the windows. It began when the Boston Public Schools attempted to close my school for no apparent reason, requiring our school community to mobilize and fight to keep it open. And then, around 2018, something started to shift.
#Antonym of ephemeral full#
It took years and substantive effort for us to impose “no school Saturdays” in our house, to guarantee ourselves at least one day when we weren’t consumed by work.įor the first 15 years of my career, this was how I functioned: at full speed, just as my immigrant parents had. On vacations, we forced ourselves to leave town for extended periods, convinced that if we stayed in Boston we would work. Most weekends included at least one day of work.
When we met for dinner in the evenings, we struggled to find energy - or even words - for one another, having exhausted most of our emotional resources on the young people in our school buildings. Most days, mine was the only car in the parking lot when I left the building the same went for that of my partner, also a teacher. And I threw myself, and my body, into that work. There was always another lesson to plan, a paper to grade, a parent to contact. As a teacher in the Boston Public Schools, my to-do list was unending. And so, for nearly two decades, I fashioned my life and my career after my parents - I worked. Rest is not a state of being that I understood for a very long time. Through observation, I came to see rest as a privilege. They lived an extremely minortized existence, and had no safety net but for the one they were building through their constant movement. My parents were Indian immigrants to Appalachia. In many ways, I’ve come to understand this way of living as an exercise in survival. And when they traveled, it was also in Drive mode - constant activity from early morning to late at night. When they weren’t entertaining, they were volunteering.
When they weren’t gardening, they were entertaining. When they weren’t exercising, they were gardening. When they weren’t working, they were exercising. I come from a family of people who only operate in one gear, and that gear is Drive. A peaceful sunrise on Jamaica Pond, Jamaica Plain, MA.
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