Grace Cox’s Reviews > Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times > Status Update

“I recognised winter.
I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I've learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important…”

“The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can't pull that off, then youd better disappear from view for a while.
You're dragging down the vibe.”

“We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts.”

“People used to complain that I talked at them instead of to them, so I discovered that I could inflect my sentences with moments of mock hesitation, adding in ums and ers to appear more uncertain than I actually felt. Now, standing in this room with the rain hammering on the window, I let my voice find its fluency again, absorbing myself in the pleasure of my own speech...”

“We are not consistently useful to the world at large… human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole. Some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.

“Without a doubt, he had taken on their traits, but to be wolflike for him was to be quiet and watchful, intent, pared back. As he spoke, his gaze was always steady, frank. Next to him, I felt like an entirely frivolous being, all cultivation and artifice. I was a domestic pet, he a wild animal. A certain raw edge had been bred out of me.”

“As I have for most of my life, I felt that I was on the cusp of getting it all right and just needed a little more time.”