On Winter

photo by Kelly Sikkema
image courtesy of unsplash.com

Winter wears me out.

I don't really have the right to complain, not anymore.  I was raised in upstate New York, where we got snow, but I've since moved twice, both times further south.  In fact I'm now living in a city where the snow birds, some from upstate New York, regularly show up in numbers at local restaurants -- it's a little weird.

To be honest, part of what put me in mind of this post was discussing the winter weather in New York and in parts similar -- colder than usual temperatures staying around longer than usual, tons and tons of snow, and wind speeds that make air that will probably kill you into air that will kill you if you're not careful.

But it's not really the weather I'm talking about when I say that winter wears me out.  I don't really mind the cold much, I sort of try to wear enough clothing and not worry about it.  Really I think it's the dark, and, like everything else, I think it's the time.  Darkness and time, not much more to it than that.
In winter when I get up in the morning, on time to get ready and go to work, it's still night time outside.  (My shift starts at 8am, I do not have a job that actually starts early in the morning.)  The car is scraped off and warming up, and we're on the road, and it's dawn but not sunrise.

(Nota bene for learning writers: the difference is that dawn is a light form that starts way before, and sunrise is exactly what it sounds like.)

And then the day is over, and I get home, and it's basically sundown. In February I have a little under an hour before it's dark outside.  I cook dinner, or my wife does (she's really good at it), we watch a little TV, I might try to write some, and we go to bed.  Vary the amount of time that each of these steps take, and you have about all the variety my winter evenings have.

Why don't I do more things with my time?  Why am I limited to just these things?

Of course I am not really limited, it's all really just a matter of habit and routine, something most people know about really.  If we wanted to we could do other things with our time, we've got four or five decent hours of time between when we get home from the day job and when it's reasonably time to turn in.

So why don't we?

The best answer I can come up with, other than the laziness of a comfortable routine, is that it's just tiring to try and get up and get things done when it's already night outside.  

Part of it has to be biological; less sunlight provokes subtle physiological changes that have a bigger impact on our personal psychological landscape than we'd probably like to admit, like the surreptitious effects of dehydration, low blood sugar, or caffeine withdrawal.  To say nothing of vitamin D, I think a world that is generally darker (and yeah colder too) has a big impact on our spontaneous available energy level, whatever that means.  Suffice to say that for millions of years, for many species of animal life on the planet, dark time equals sleep time.

I've read articles that suggest that it's really just a matter of adaptation.  Up until a hundred years or so ago, call it a hundred and fifty to be on the safe side, there was no such thing as cheap and reliable artificial illumination in most parts of the world.  It's only since electricity and the incandescent bulb and its spiritual successors ramped up that we've had those four or five hours between the end of the work day and bed time to work with.  

Have we adjusted to the change well?  Is it good for us to use that time, instead of turning in shortly after the sun, sleeping half the night, rising for a snack around twelve, and bedding back down again like (I've read) the seventeenth and eighteenth century-dwellers did?

Who knows.  As a storyteller I find myself imagining 11th century Norsemen, living through the winter with their families in low, thick-walled long houses, deep in Scandinavian night, and endlessly rehashing the long sagas of their gods and wars by the low firelight.  I think about the stores of frontier cottages in the middle of this country, and how much time and care of the rest of the year went into making sure that there was enough for another winter to be survived.

I've never really struggled through a winter in any sense other than mild inconvenience and the bland chilly malaise I'm right now trying to get a handle on.  To the people who came before me and made lives and families in the world, Winter was something like a great rival, the big challenge that defined the highs and lows and work of the rest of the year.  

Nowadays there are the occasional high risks and bad surprises, but for most people most of the time, in the temperate zones anyway, the worst we can expect is having to wait an extra day before getting back down the road to the closest supermarket.

So how can we turn all this energy, or the lack thereof, into profit?  Should I just start going to bed at 7 at night, and taking a break from hibernation around one in the morning to write a little?  My nature is generally more disposed to self-annihilation in the first hour or so of being deprived of bed, so that plan's probably out, when I turn in, I turn in for good.  So sleep from 7pm until what, 4 in the morning?  And have two or three hours of nighttime to work with before work instead of after it?  There may actually be something to that, if I could make it stick, but who knows.

In the end the answer will be to stick it out, and to wait for spring.  That's another big part of our culture, I feel like, and certainly part of most every story I've ever heard.  Things get bad, get worse, then they get better again.  We pass the solstice around Christmastime after all, and that's when our sense of the big dark cold has barely started.  It's a siege, a long and slow assault on our senses, to get through the world's rest to the other side.