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“You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.”
―
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“Wintering is a season in the cold. 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. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Working Together
Composed by David Whyte as a dedication to the 777 at the request of Boeing corporation. Whyte wanted to be sure not to write a corporate propaganda piece and hence he drew upon his own fear of flying to write something very meaningful. The idea of travelling 550 miles per hour at 33,000 feet with no visible means of support can be scary. However, we today know that the plane gets its support from the interaction between velocity and the wing shape. Velocity and the aerodynamic shape have existed in nature since time immemorial, but humans only discovered the power of bringing them together only about 140 years. That discovery has allowed us to travel all over the world today. Using this as a metaphor, he wrote about many hidden qualities in ourselves that we may need to bring together to achieve more than we can imagine.
We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.
The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way
the intangible air
traveled at speed
round a shaped wing
easily
holds our weight.
So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self,
by forming it well
to the great
intangibles about us.”
―
Composed by David Whyte as a dedication to the 777 at the request of Boeing corporation. Whyte wanted to be sure not to write a corporate propaganda piece and hence he drew upon his own fear of flying to write something very meaningful. The idea of travelling 550 miles per hour at 33,000 feet with no visible means of support can be scary. However, we today know that the plane gets its support from the interaction between velocity and the wing shape. Velocity and the aerodynamic shape have existed in nature since time immemorial, but humans only discovered the power of bringing them together only about 140 years. That discovery has allowed us to travel all over the world today. Using this as a metaphor, he wrote about many hidden qualities in ourselves that we may need to bring together to achieve more than we can imagine.
We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.
The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way
the intangible air
traveled at speed
round a shaped wing
easily
holds our weight.
So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self,
by forming it well
to the great
intangibles about us.”
―
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it; but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Deepika’s 2025 Year in Books
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