Narrator: It was a perfect Indian summer day in September. On a beach in Folkestone, pastel-colored huts lined the shore and the sea was a calm turquoise. Author Katherine May was celebrating her upcoming fortieth birthday with friends, her husband H, and their son, Bert. But amidst the idyllic scene, a shadow fell. H began to feel sick, a discomfort that quickly escalated from a minor stomach bug to agonizing pain. By that night, in a chaotic hospital waiting room, his appendix burst. This sudden, life-threatening crisis plunged May's world into an unexpected freeze, marking the beginning of a period she would come to understand as a personal "winter." This experience, and the profound reflections that followed, form the heart of her book, Wintering: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen, which offers a powerful guide to navigating the inevitable fallow seasons of our lives.

Narrator: May defines "wintering" as a fallow period in life when one feels cut off from the world, rejected, or blocked from progress. It can be triggered by illness, grief, job loss, or any number of personal crises. Modern society, she argues, often stigmatizes these periods, treating them as personal failures to be hidden away. This pressure to always appear successful and happy leads people to conceal their struggles, fostering isolation and shame.

The book's central argument is that these winters are not just unavoidable; they are a natural and essential part of the human experience. May's own winter began with her husband's sudden illness. What started as a celebratory beach day descended into a terrifying vigil at the hospital, where she had to fight for his care. The trauma of this event, followed by her own subsequent burnout and illness, forced her to step back from her life. She realized that these periods, while painful, are not meant to be endured with gritted teeth. Instead, they are invitations to rest, reflect, and transform. May suggests that wisdom resides in those who have wintered, as these challenging times bring about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our lives. The first step to navigating them is to accept their inevitability and learn to "invite the winter in."

Narrator: Once a winter begins, the question becomes how to navigate it. May finds inspiration in the Finnish concept of talvitelat, which describes the extensive preparations for the literal winter. In a conversation with her Finnish friend Hanne, she learns about the practical and mental readiness required to face months of darkness and cold—from chopping firewood and buying winter tires to baking and foraging. This act of "making ready" is not about preventing the winter, but about creating a "bed of straw" to soften its impact.

For May, this preparation takes the form of small, manageable activities that ground her during a period of illness and overwhelm. She finds solace in her kitchen, attempting to bake bagels even when the yeast is expired and the mixer breaks. The outcome is less important than the process; as she puts it, "I am not baking because I’m hungry; I am baking to keep my hands moving." These simple, hands-on rituals—cooking, preserving, coloring—become a form of therapy. They provide a sense of purpose and control when the larger world feels chaotic, allowing her to reconnect with neglected sources of joy and rediscover lost parts of her identity.

Narrator: Wintering is often a period of profound transformation, a metamorphosis that reshapes one's perspective on life. May explores this through the powerful story of Shelly Goldsmith, an artist who fell into a coma from bacterial meningitis at seventeen. Shelly’s experience of near-death and her slow, understated recovery highlights how illness can strip away our defenses and force a confrontation with our own vulnerability. After waking from the coma, Shelly’s mother had to peel grapes and move her jaw just to get her to eat. The experience was so profound that Shelly later described that part of her life as "a bit of a ghost."

Years later, another wintering arrived when Shelly's parents emigrated, leaving her feeling abandoned and without a support system. This emotional crisis, though not a physical illness, became a catalyst for a creative breakthrough. She began a project using unwanted children's clothes from an orphanage, channeling her grief into her art. As Shelly explains, "The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other." Her story powerfully illustrates that wintering, whether from illness or loss, is not simply a period of decline but an essential phase in a larger cycle of growth and renewal.

Narrator: While winter is often associated with hardship, May discovers that actively embracing the cold and dark can be deeply restorative. She recounts a trip to Iceland, taken while she was feeling physically and emotionally drained, in search of the healing warmth of the Blue Lagoon. Yet, she finds her truest sense of calm not in the geothermal spa, but while watching the restless patterns of the wind on the slate-blue Atlantic during a whale-watching trip. She realizes, "I am native here," feeling a profound connection to the stark, northern landscape.

This idea is further explored through the practice of cold-water swimming. Initially hesitant, May eventually commits to swimming in the sea year-round with a friend. The experience is transformative. The shock of the cold water forces her into the present moment, washing away anxiety. She learns from the story of Dorte Lyager, a woman who uses cold-water swimming to manage her bipolar disorder, finding that the cold clarifies her mind in a way medication never could. For May, the act of braving the cold becomes a source of empowerment. As she notes, "By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient." It demonstrates that facing discomfort head-on, rather than retreating from it, can build both physical and mental fortitude.

Narrator: The journey through wintering does not end with a single, dramatic epiphany. Instead, it is a gradual thaw, a slow turning of the year marked by small gestures and a commitment to healing. May illustrates this through the experience of pulling her six-year-old son, Bert, out of school. He was suffering from severe anxiety, and May realized that forcing him to conform to a system that was making him miserable was a disservice to his well-being. She recognized that "happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn."

This decision was its own form of wintering for their family, requiring them to find a new rhythm outside of conventional structures. To help her son understand this difficult period, May used an analogy from the Harry Potter series. She drew a story arc, pointing out the "nadir"—the lowest point where all seems lost—and explained that this is always followed by the "fightback." This reframing helped them both see their struggle not as an endpoint, but as a necessary part of a larger journey toward recovery. Wintering, she concludes, is the "active acceptance of sadness" and the courage to heal. The return of spring is not a sudden event, but a slow, cyclical process of letting go and embracing change.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Wintering is that the fallow periods of our lives are not a sign of failure but a vital, restorative, and deeply human experience. Katherine May reframes these times of hardship, not as problems to be fixed or rushed through, but as a natural season that demands acceptance, rest, and reflection. It is in the quiet cold of our personal winters that we can shed what no longer serves us, find unexpected sources of resilience, and prepare for an eventual, inevitable thaw.

The book challenges us to look at our own lives and the lives of others with more compassion. The next time you or someone you know enters a winter, what if you resisted the urge to offer easy solutions or demand a quick recovery? What if, instead, you simply honored the season for what it is: a time to be still, to heal, and to trust that, in the darkness, something new is waiting to grow?