10 Weeks of Winter

Counting on songbirds…

Every day of my life the sun has risen and the sun has set. Every year the seasons turn. Without fail the tides wash in and recede. In the short span of time I have and will exist on this Earth, mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, roads, continents, and oceans endure like permanent fixtures. Baring cataclysm, the seemingly everlasting features of the planet may subtly shapeshift in a century, but their true timescale for transformation is vaster than human generations. For us mere mortals, the lasting geographical features, ecological systems, and infrastructure of the world create a sense of reliability, consistency, dependability, and safety.

In winter I count on the songbirds that visit my balcony, the pleasure of sweater weather, the excitement of snow, the novelty of Christmas decorations, the opportunity for great deals, and the contentedness of sipping hot beverages. The experiences that are reliable to winter come with the predictability of tradition and seasonality. Migratory patterns, weather forecasting, market cycles, and event calendars set the geometry of the season – a snowflake fractaled into a modified but oh so familiar model!

Burying nuts…

The characteristic qualities of winter are sustained through maintenance. Actively, features of winter are made by agents participating in their biological drives and cultural expressions. Like squirrels storing nuts or people wrapping gifts, regular or routine tasks both keep the season and forward it into the future. Buried nuts become trees which yield nuts to be buried. Beautifully wrapped gifts bring joy and make memories that create the desire to wrap gifts to bring joy and make memories. Passively, elemental and astronomical forces establish conditions living things have adapted to and require to engage in the totality of their lives and to perpetuate life into the future. The degree or extent of a freeze impacts insect populations, which impacts birds and plants, and so on. Year to year renewal and variation feed into macro-cycles that balance and rebalance the chemistry of life – terrestrial life nourishing recycling of matter.

Maintenance as a word conveys a dullness, mundanity, or a tone of chores to be done. At least, that’s how the word makes me feel. Nevertheless, I think it is the right word for the function of keeping something in good repair, preserved, or lasting. It’s easy to view maintenance with an air of tiredness or lethargy. Cliches like “wash, rinse, repeat” describe the kind of humdrum attitude that I think most of us take to activities of maintenance. Doing the laundry, working out, and taking out the trash need to be done. Doing them provides a better quality of life, and not doing them only leads to problems. For me, whether or not I have a good experience with maintenance activities has everything to do with my attitude toward them and very little or nothing to do with the activities themselves. It’s neither difficult nor unpleasant to do laundry, but it takes time and there are a million things I’d rather do. Suddenly, with the approaching demand of a task that’s less desirable than other activities, I become more acutely aware of the value of my time. Doing laundry becomes expensive, it takes away from other things I imagine I’d prefer to do (or perhaps even need to do). Or so it seems if I adopt an attitude of resistance toward the activity, but there is another way to look at it.

Meaning in maintenance…

Activities of maintenance, like cleaning or exercise, can be considered acts of respect or care. If I wish to remember and honor a loved one who has passed, I may diligently dust the objects handed down to me. If I want to show respect to the next person to use a piece of workout equipment, I will attend to wiping down the machine when I’m finished using it. An attitude of caring for something or someone or showing respect is a helpful reframe on maintenance activities, and this reframe can be further enhanced by including yourself as someone whom you are supporting. I have found that my self-respect has grown when I treat my future self as someone who I care for and want to feel good. A simple start: make sure the kitchen is tidy before bed. Getting up to a shiny clean kitchen feels wonderful! It’s like the day has been set up just for me to use. And all it took was that minor bit of care taking. For a while, it took some effort to get myself to do something that seemed like it could wait until tomorrow. But when I didn’t tidy, I didn’t wake up to a clean kitchen, and already I was off to a start laden with tasks to complete visually represented by my messy kitchen. Eventually I became motivated by the value of the experience for my future self, and increasingly I became satisfied with doing the tidying in the evening because that good feeling grew more and more attached to the experience of getting the kitchen cleaned. More than that even, it became a trigger for shifting my evening and behavior in the direction of rest and eased me into sleep better.

Do I manage to tidy the kitchen every night? No. But I do on most evenings, and, because I do, it rarely gets so out of hand that I can’t tidy up quickly or get caught up the next day. Maintenance is about showing up for the pieces and parts of life that need a little attention to stay in good working, orderly form so that you can use them, count on them, feel confident and secure that what you need and what needs to work for you is there. Maintenance practices don’t need to be intense or large scale. They work best when their contained and readily doable (e.g., the vacuum can be pulled out at any moment to clean the floor). If a practice isn’t available to do with minimal effort to start prep work needs to be done to facilitate quick, easy, and direct access to doing maintenance (e.g., if the vacuum is buried and has to be extracted from the depths of a closet vacuuming is less available to maintain floors).

Good maintenance practices can make chaos and crises that pop up more manageable and can act as a safety net when life becomes a highwire act. Like being in good health, a well maintained life offers a resiliency that fosters ease.

For my 10 Weeks of Winter project new protocols (interventions) and behaviors I intended to reduce or limit (abstinence) will need to be maintained so that they can fully support me in my hope to once again appreciate and experience the winter season. Today marks the end of the first week. I have begun applying the new protocols (red light therapy, morning light viewing, vitamin D, movement, etc.) loosely this week, by just doing them and seeing how they fit into my regular schedule. Moving into week 2, the goal is to maintain these protocols at a baseline minimum on a regular consistent schedule throughout the remaining 9 weeks of winter. The foundation has been laid, now, with maintenance, I will build brick by brick, day by day with consistent practice and application, a more robust physical and mental condition for enjoying the winter. From here the posts will mostly turn from topics of making change to the subject of the season itself. It’s time for hot chocolate and concerts and light displays and cozy nights.