IS IT SPRING YET? | The value of winter

Over the past week, we had a few days that had been unusually warm, for this time of the year, for winter. With comforting highs in the 60’s, wherever you’d go in the city, you’d find yourself surrounded by humans rejoicing with the outdoors, raising the universal question at the tail ends of winter: Is it spring yet?

Then, it started raining/snowing/freezing again. Spring was put on hold for another moment. And as winter made its reappearance, so did the prayers for it to finally be over.

It’s all too human: we want to be warm when it’s cold. We long for balmier conditions in the midst of a harsh winter, for the happiness a sunny day in spring provides.

Leaving my office on Friday night, making my way through winter’s return and forced to slow down from usual city pace, I pondered upon a quote of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

“All joys want eternity, deep profound eternity.“

And it’s so true. We are, by nature, hard-wired to crave this alluring, intoxicating concoction of dopamine, serotonin and carefreeness.

A few weeks ago, dear friends of mine hosted an adult prom, an experience, that left me feeling exhilarated, with every drop of sweat induced by hours of dancing containing sheer exuberance. At the end of the night, I caught myself thinking: I wish this would never end.

We tell each other to “Have the best day ever”, we’ve been conditioned to seek “Good vibes only” and further, this need to be happy at all times - we’ve almost become anesthetized to the word‘s potency.

And it’s precisely in this that we come to feel alien. From nature, from ourselves. From others.

I feel we need to question the way happiness has been positioned as our highest truth, for it is misleading. For it creates emotional exclusiveness, where what we need is inclusiveness. At best, this tagline mentality forms a disjointed version of ourselves, preventing us from ever experiencing feeling whole. At worst, it has us resort to medicating. With an infinite number of distractions at our disposal – devices/ drugs/dating apps - we are forever chasing an emotional high, a feeling that by definition is elusive.

We may buy a plane ticket to flee an all too long winter to warmer shores; Tulum/South Beach or wherever the birds of our feathers may flock. Escaping our own emotional winters however, does not come as swiftly as booking our next 75 degrees destination. Instead, our attempt in doing so perpetuates an already epidemic incapacity to hold, to withstand unpleasant weather conditions; when an emotion breaches the limits of our understanding.

The better guardrails to governing an ever-changing inner and outer world might look less like a tagline and instead embrace all of our (emotional) seasons, including those that are cold, difficult and plain uncomfortable. Not as sexy as “Good vibes only”. But life isn’t an Instagram quote.

The good news is, that whilst this involves sacrifice (another less fashionable term) and sitting in the cold (winter) light of inconvenient truths, it will cater to something much more worthwhile than an endless spring/summer on repeat: a deeper understanding of oneself. The ability to experience the beauty that lies in the complexity of being human, in the richness and rawness it offers.

And, we’ll eventually find ourselves geared up for any weather condition, for in this process of becoming whole - because that's what it truly is - compassion and empathy are more readily available to us.

So we can say, it may not be spring yet, and that’s alright. 

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life. - Jiddu Krishnamurti