Wintering with Our Feelings (Katherine May)

Listen now (46 mins) | "We might see wintering as this defined phase where we are struggling, but I wanted to talk about being in contact with our emotions on an everyday basis..."

You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I love Katherine May, and all of her books. She’s been on the podcast a few times but I wanted to have her back this season to talk about the topic of her first book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. It is, I believe, more relevant now than ever.

Katherine thinks and talks beautifully about following the imperfect paths of our lives, and the long arcs of our stories—as opposed to trying to rush our way through each phase. She helps us to be with sadness and grief—and to recognize, as she says, that you don’t need to bring the best sparkly version of yourself to your own healing. What a relief.

Katherine also brings us so much joy. She made me laugh throughout our conversation. And not surprisingly, we threaded our way through a wide variety of topics, from our creative processes to why Katherine believes we’re missing a connection to place.

KATHERINE’S EPISODES ON PULLING THE THREAD:

Episode 1: “Passing as Normal”

Episode 2: “Falling in Love with the World”

MORE FROM KATHERINE MAY:

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home

Katherine’s Website

Listen to her podcast, How We Live Now, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow her on Instagram

Follow her on Substack

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I was just going through my notes on Wintering and I was thinking how I met you when I was in my own deep wintering, which was so fun. Just yesterday, my kids were saying that there were obviously parts of the pandemic that they did not miss, and we were very lucky obviously as we got through it, but that they missed it. And I had been thinking for a while, particularly I knew I was going to talk to you, that I also missed that period of my life when everything had been canceled and I didn't have a job and I didn't have a podcast and I was, all I had was a book deal and that was all I did. That's quite a nice feeling. It was so amazing. I just thought and read and researched and wrote, and now I'm trying to write my next book, but it's kind of boiling around you basically.

KATHERINE:

Yeah,

ELISE:

The same level of chaos. Katherine, I think we all are right.

KATHERINE:

I have been thinking a lot about this lately because there's loads I miss about that pandemic moment when everything fell quiet. But also I feel like my life underwent an overcorrection at that point and that I cut too many things out and then well, I had to cut a load of things out. But what I mean is I found it really hard to go back in and a lot of that's kind of stuck. So still, if someone asks me out in the evening and it's dark, there's a big and terrible part of me that's like, I don't think I'll do that. That just doesn't seem very nice and that's fine, but that means that I think I've missed a lot of social contact really. It's really hard, what we're four years out of, or four years from the beginning, nearly five years, and life is still a bit weird because of it, I think.

ELISE:

Yeah, that idea of friendship being the thing that takes the hit, I definitely relate to that, which I don't know if I am mad about it, but what's also so interesting, I would imagine for your experience is that the pandemic and wintering launched you as an international superstar, Catherine. No, but it kind of did, right? It completely blew up and expanded your platform.

KATHERINE:

Yeah.

ELISE:

I don't know if it feels that way to you, but

KATHERINE:

Well, here's the thing. It kind of did quite gradually because I think everyone was a bit sleepy. So even though the book did really well, I think it took people a minute to find me because I wasn't necessarily doing live in person. It is that in in-person thing again. But I realized at the beginning of this year that I guess my body hadn't caught up with the change. And so intellectually I kind of knew that that had happened, but there was still a big part of me that hadn't absorbed it and I was having this kind of real, I dunno, resistant reaction to whenever anyone told me I'd been successful. If people came and spoke to me in the street, I'd be like, what? Why is this happening? And the reason I noticed was it was a year after Enchantment had published and I found the sheet that I printed out from a year before that showed it in the bestseller chart in the New York Times bestseller chart, and I'd forgotten it had happened completely. I hadn't even registered that it had done that in my head. I'd had a moderately successful book and it was kind of fine and I really realized that I hadn't actually processed the change. And I think part of that was because it all happened online, so it felt like it was this weird thing that was happening on the TV almost like it wasn't my actual life. It's quite odd.

ELISE:

Thinking about the isolation. People ask me how I am producing as much work across different areas as I am, and part of it is that I'm a workaholic and part of it is that I really only work and spend time with my family. I have a pretty paltry social life.

KATHERINE:

Should we admit this in public?

ELISE:

I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe we can normalize it for people, but

KATHERINE:

Yeah, it's so different because I've always been so resistant to working really hard for people that aren't me. I've never wanted to invest my entire life in someone else's organization because you just know that you are always vulnerable to just losing everything really fast. But for my work, I never want to stop doing it. There's never a moment when I think, oh yeah, no, I'm not interested in this today. It is just so completely compelling to me. And yeah, most of the time, I mean, I'm not going to literary parties or whatever. I dunno if they even exist, honestly. Yeah, I find it quite hard to stop actually. And sometimes I realize I'm really tired and I really need to take a break, but even then I'll pick up a book that a publicist sent me that I need to learn. It's really terrible. Or read something that might just be research for the book. Yeah, it's hard to switch off when your work is your absolute passion. It's like why would you switch off? It's tricky.

ELISE:

Do you research a lot for your books?

KATHERINE:

You must do as well. You must research a ton.

ELISE:

I research a ton, ton. I'm compulsive about it in a way that doesn't serve ultimately, but yes. Do you?

KATHERINE:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to know absolutely everything about every topic I'm writing, and quite often that will turn into two or three paragraphs and you've done this sort of deep, deep dive and developed weird academic theories about the subject that you are researching, and then you have to put all of that aside to write the actual book completely irrelevant and you can Yeah, yeah, I do. I love that bit though. It is a lovely, lovely foraging experience it favorite bit.

ELISE:

It really, that's the best way to put it. Thank you for that. I also have to finish everything I start and so often I'll start reading a book and get 80 pages in and realize it's not really relevant to anything.

KATHERINE:

Oh, and you read it anyway. Oh, I don't. I'm terrible. I'm the person that can take one bite out of a cookie and put it down and I can definitely do the same with a book. Yeah, yeah. I'm not a completer finisher, whatever that kind of trait is, I'm not that person.

ELISE:

It's not helpful. So I'm relieved for you.

KATHERINE:

It must take you a lot of time actually.

ELISE:

It takes me a lot of time. And then I like to write these big thinky books, boil the ocean books, books that could be many different books at the same time, and so that also creates a lot anxiety.

KATHERINE:

Can I ask? Ask the really geeky question. How do you manage all your research? What's your system? This is not my podcast, but I need

ELISE:

To ask this right now. No, I'm happy to answer it. And people ask me all the time. So when I read, I mark up books, then I go back and I type up every passage that I have marked. So I have many, many pages of notes, for example, on wintering on all your books. And so then I have those all on my computer and then as I'm going, I am sorting into relevant chapters depending on what I'm writing. And then this is terrible and I'm apologize to the trees, but I need physical copies of my notes, so I print them in very small font, but then I will show you I have,

KATHERINE:

Oh yeah, I'd love to see.

ELISE:

I have all these bags of flag organized notes per chapter.

KATHERINE:

Oh, I love it. I love it. I love that so much. Sorry, I need to know, is that handwriting on there, is that printed somehow? It looks really.

ELISE:

It's from one of those little printing. Printing machines. Yeah, doing my label maker just majestic. You can imagine how much satisfaction. So then I can, if I am going somewhere to work, I can take the right envelope.

KATHERINE:

I also like you. I don't think it's enough to just read a book. I think you have to write out the quotes. Reading and highlighting is so forgettable, so I like to hand write them rather than type them just it feels less fiddly and then because that that's got a searchability problem, I then photocopy them and put them into folder. So there's all these layers of work,

ELISE:

But I think there is research too that handwriting is more in training to the brain. I love that. I also

KATHERINE:

Find, but by the way, it's processing, isn't it? Yeah,

ELISE:

Yeah, it is processing. It's so interesting too. I don't know if this happens to you, but I'll be on a walk and I'll have this insight and I will text myself and then I come back to it and I'm like, what this?

KATHERINE:

Yeah, I've had that loads of times, but I find it really fertile territory to walk and voice recorders. I'm going along quite often. I'll record thousands of words that way. They're not usable words, but they're useful. Let's just say they're not words that I could put into a document and use them as text, which, because there's a lot of me going anyway, but I often make such progress when I'm doing that. It's really, really, really lovely.

ELISE:

I do that too, and my hunch about it, I don't know if this resonates for you, is that there's some sort of intuitive energy in the moment or the expression of the words that when actually captured auditor, you can tap into whatever it was that was present or rising in a way that just texting notes flattens it.

KATHERINE:

Yeah, I think that's right because when I write onto my phone, I'm frustrated and I think it shows I'm cutting corners because I don't really love texting on the screen. I've got fat fingers. It just doesn't produce. It's just so frustrating. I'm constantly making mistakes and going back, whereas when there's something energetic about the writing that comes out of walking, I think it's because you are in quite a pure mind state. You're not really doing anything else. Your body's busy. You're just hearing the stuff that's pouring out of your brain and there's no real mediation. I think it's one of the reasons I love walking is I can talk to myself and nobody will see me. It's just great. I love talking to myself really handy.

ELISE:

Walking is core to your brand. You're a walker.

KATHERINE:

Yeah, there we go.

ELISE:

Do you meditate? I'm a walking meditator too, but do you meditate as well? Yeah,

KATHERINE:

I do. I feel like I'm not doing it as much as I normally do at the moment, and I think partly that's, I'm kind of maybe doing other stuff. I feel like I need to walk or meditate and maybe they're quite interchangeable for me and I go through phases when I find it really hard to do the stillness part of meditation basically, and I like to just move and think at the same time, and that can take me there too. But yeah, in general I would say I am. I'm just going through a little phase at the moment that it's not quite the thing that I need right now. It's funny how that happens.

ELISE:

I think that people like you and people who have really fast minds, your primary element is probably metal. I felt great comfort in this, but when I was speaking to this Celtic shaman, this energy healer named Prune Harris, and she looked at my energy and she was like, well, you're not a meditator. You can't meditate. And I said, no, I really can't. I have to be moving. And she was like, that's completely fine. That counts. I had a fair amount of shame about not being able to just sit. Yeah, it's actually a total ancillary to what so much of your work is about, which is rest release reprieve and a different type of stillness, but a stillness that's less about don't move and more about relax and recognize that not every season yields fruit and that there's nothing pathological about taking a break.

KATHERINE:

Yeah, absolutely. And to follow imperfect paths and stories with very long arcs rather than rushing your way through the phrases of whatever it is you're going through or trying to bring the best sparkly version of yourself to your own healing. It just doesn't work. It's just completely ineffective and it's mean to yourself. And then we go and repeat that meanness outwards to other people because we're like, well, I had to do it this way, so you've got to do it that way too. Come down off it, have a little rest. It's okay. You don't have to live your whole life at peak performance. You can't. It's not possible. All my work just comes down to that, I think.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and it felt like for a moment, because Wintering did it come out in February, 2020 in the UK?

KATHERINE:

It did, in the US it came out in November.

ELISE:

It's a beautiful book. I love wintering for anyone who's listening who hasn't read it, and it's more relevant than ever. I think we're coming back

KATHERINE:

Into a big phase of it being

ELISE:

Really

KATHERINE:

Relevant. Yeah,

ELISE:

Yeah. It's back, back, baby. It's back baby. We took this moment, I feel like so many people took it in, oh, well, this is broken. And the dual, this pandemic is terrifying and awful, and certainly for many people it was. And alternately, wow, we really needed this cultural timeout and what are we doing and our current modern life isn't

KATHERINE:

Working, and

ELISE:

Then we've slowly gotten back to our old ways. Is that fair to say?

KATHERINE:

I think so, but I think there's this lingering sense of grief that is really present in our societies, both of our societies, which is very unexpressed. We weren't able to fully live it at the time, and by the time everything started opening up again, it felt like the moment had passed and yet it hadn't passed in us and we hadn't marked those really massive transitions. And there's still, there's something there about it. You can see it affecting the way people are approaching their lives. They're still making the really huge changes that comes from a disruptive moment like that, I would say.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then talk about this moment. What do you think is happening now besides so many things?

KATHERINE:

Yeah, I mean maybe it's almost continuous, but you guys have had your big election. We've had a big election cycle too in the uk, and I think even regardless of the outcomes of those elections, there has been a sense of real kind of stirring of feeling a sense of everyone feeling really stirred up and unsettled for the time running up to them. And then of course, you guys have had a result that has really upset a lot of people, and at the same time, we are confronting multiple wars going on in the background. There's this huge sense of social disquiet being unable to speak to each other about that without falling out feeling. Just that sense of genuine devastation about the awful thing that's happened to, or the awful things that have happened to people not understanding what the course of those are and how that's going to pan out into the future.

There's so much of that and we're beginning to see the real true effects of the climate emergency too late as well in lots of ways, and it's frightening just a lot, massively apocalyptic, revolutionary times, and I think there is this vast unsettled feeling that has really fallen among us that we just don't really know how to even confront. We haven't got a structure through which we might process that. We are all trying to do it on our own, and that's not the right way to do this, I don't think, even for you and me, even for little introverts who don't make me go out and talk to people.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and you used the word apocalyptic, and I love that word because the etymology is to uncover, to reveal, and it feels like at least certainly here, one of the things that's happening is this, we're so bad, I don't know if it's the same in the uk, but in the US it's like we will do anything except talk about class and

KATHERINE:

Right now. Wow.

ELISE:

Yeah, and obviously it's sort of Venn diagrams class, Venn diagrams here, particularly with gender and race in many ways, but we're also getting this massive class reckoning as the inequity is just, it's like gilded age level of haves and have nots and the vengeance, the anger directed at the wrong people. The male is sent to the wrong address, and yet I understand why people are so angry and wanting this certainty or strong man

KATHERINE:

Who says he can solve it.

ELISE:

Yeah,

KATHERINE:

That's so interesting. I mean, my degree is in sociology, so I'm obsessed with class and I'm British. The British are obsessed with class and we are really uber conscious of it in a way that doesn't read across societies, I think. But I think for us, our class structures have really shifted and we dunno how to talk about that and we dunno how to be within the groupings that are emerging. But yeah, life has got massively expensive for a huge sway of the country and only a very few people can really afford it, and that is such a huge change. I'm 47. When I left university, I could afford to buy a house. I was living in a cheap town and I knew that property prices were very depressed at the time, but nevertheless, I could graduate and buy myself somewhere to get a mortgage something outright, and now kids of the same age are facing the prospect of never being able to move out of shared accommodation, let alone own somewhere. That's a seismic social shift in terms of belonging, in terms of being able to build stability, in terms of feeling like the society you are in is welcoming you into adulthood and allowing you to thrive. It's so basic to need somewhere to live,

And that has created a deepening of that class divide because the only young people who can afford to live anywhere on their own have got parents that are paying for it, and that really cements inequality.

ELISE:

I feel like for so many, and this isn't entirely, I think you have to be pretty special to work around this, but stability is required in many ways for meaning, and it's really hard to throw yourself into meaningful trait or meaningful a meaningful life if you have no security or stability and you are not outside of scarcity, and you guys obviously have the land of aristocracy and all of that, whereas here in the US there's obviously a lot of intergenerational wealth that persists but have this looming specter of the quote, self-made man, which is

KATHERINE:

Bureaucracy, it's being called or something like that.

ELISE:

The broligarchy and…

KATHERINE:

Broligarchy. Great.

ELISE:

Yes, which is in many ways dooming us all as we resist this idea that actually we do need communities of care, and maybe it's not shared living with other 20 year olds, but it is this tight-knit, we're cracking under the pressure of trying to do this all.

KATHERINE:

There's no support system, and I think one of the things for me that doesn't seem to come up in the discussion much, but which I find incredibly important, is the way that all of that stability would let you develop a connection to place, to your landscape, to your sense of being from somewhere, belonging somewhere, but also the sense that you can be in your landscape and understand the terrain and have a relationship with that. For me, that is a deep unspoken connection that a lot of people don't have anymore, and they don't know that they're supposed to miss it, so they don't understand that they've lost it, and that does help you to establish that deeper tie with your community to take care of your land, to really care if it gets polluted or broken or ruined, damaged in subway, ripped apart. We dunno how to think about ourselves as people who belong in a landscape anymore, and that is something that I think urgently needs reestablishing that takes us back to indigenous knowledge of the landscape and the stuff that we have Definitely, definitely lost.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, that feels like such a massive point and wound particularly in a place like the United States where apart from the indigenous people who are still here but who have also been relocated.

KATHERINE:

Absolutely. Yeah.

ELISE:

You have millions of people who don't really necessarily know where they came from but came from elsewhere and are searching for their identity in other ways, whether it's through 23 and Me or whatever it may be, and if this is a fundamental problem, obviously on our

KATHERINE:

Planet, I'm be interested about that. For Americans, there seems to be that very strong desire to really understand your ethnic heritage, even for white people, this sort of sense of,

ELISE:

Well, everyone's indigenous somewhere, right, so where are we indigenous to?

KATHERINE:

Yeah,

ELISE:

Yeah,

KATHERINE:

Yeah,

ELISE:

And then feeling like those distinctions mean you're an interloper, which is true in some ways, but then if you didn't necessarily make that choice, so you're carrying this ancestral burden and I think just feeling of I don't know what my land is and I don't know where I came from. Yeah,

KATHERINE:

That's fascinating.

ELISE:

I think it creates a lot of, understandably, a lot of anxiety and yes, we are here in America and this extreme identity politics, which as the world has watched, has blown up in our faces, but I still think we're trying to navigate it and a lot of the identity stuff that's happening I think is a way for people to figure out who their tribe is and where they belong because we don't have a lot of places of belonging anymore. I want to just go back to something that you had said, which is I might read to you if you don't mind, from this moment and wintering and we glossed over it, but I think it's important to come back to, which is this idea of not really ever having the time to attend to our grief, and when we're in it, we can't do it, and then everything gets busy again, so you write, but if happiness is a skill, then sadness is too.

Perhaps through all those years at school or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore it, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn't there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call that is wintering. It is the act acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition. Our true needs felt keenly as a knife. I love that section and I think it's still relevant. I think some of us got into or at least touched the sadness, the collective grief and the personal grief that we'd each been carrying, but then we put it down, right?

KATHERINE:

Yeah. I think there is that continuing discomfort with being seen to be sad in general. Sad is an umbrella term for a whole load of different difficult feelings. It's really interesting. We're like playing modern United Nations here, but I think another kind of difference is that here in the UK it's still very unusual for people to access long-term counseling support, to have a therapist in the way that you guys will do and to pay for it yourself. On the NHS, you'll get a course of six sessions, which is just really clearing your throat. If you're someone that's in long-term therapy, it feels like we're in a bit of a rush to heal and that therefore that kind of gives us this impression that it should be over pretty quickly. And of course we know that there's a much, much longer winding path to really processing the kind of big changes, but that's why I went on to write Enchantment after Wintering because I wanted to talk about how we might see wintering as this defined phase where we are struggling, but I wanted to talk about being in contact with our emotions on an everyday basis and how we build an architecture that lets us feel our feelings, feel doubtful, feel uncertain, not always be achieving the stuff that we want to achieve and how we make contact with the world through that every day.

Always. That felt really important to me to write about after because actually people tend to think, oh, it's fine. Then after wintering, everything's great. That's just not how it is. You're not going to never have a negative emotion again.

ELISE:

Yeah,

KATHERINE:

So sorry people,

ELISE:

But I think that there is, that we've moved away into this, that life is always up into the right and up into the right and things that are bad are annoying, but instead of these moments that are part of this essential cycle where the tree doesn't flower every year and the ups and downs and curl cues are really the spiral is how I experience life, particularly when I'm taking another turn and I'm like, oh, I remember this situation, but hopefully I'm seeing it from a different slightly higher elevation.

KATHERINE:

That's it. I mean, it is not that we don't make progress, but sometimes that progress is wisdom and experience rather than being a better human being to the outside world as far as the outside world will judge you, and I think we find that very, very hard to accept. I think we want to be able to solve things. We want to find the right technique that gets that packs more into our life, not just kind of makes us happier, but makes us do more, be more. There's so little in our culture that says, do you know what? Maybe you can't do a yoga class, a Pilates class, a kickboxing class, and a needle craft session every week and stay sane, as well as having your job and looking after your children and looking after your parents, and maybe all those things can't actually fit into your life, and that's actually really normal. It's okay. It's okay to sometimes have an evening watching tv. That's not a failure. That's just you as a human being, taking a little rest because you're tired and you can't make every minute of your day an achievement. It's so obvious when you say it, but we do believe that we can be constantly improving somehow, and I'm not sure what we think we'll find at the other end of that rainbow. If we manage that, it's probably not perfect happiness.

ELISE:

Yeah. Now, what does feel like work to you? Work for me is often a joy, and so I have trouble stopping or that's what I tell myself, but what?

KATHERINE:

Emails? Emails. I hate. Emails absolutely hate them. They take up so much of my time. They demand something from me. Yeah. I hate emails. Anything financial, I will put off nearly eternally if I can get away with it. Yeah, there's plenty that feels that work to me, and I hate cleaning. Sorry. I know you're supposed to find joy in it. I hate it.

ELISE:

Who says you're supposed to find joy in it?

KATHERINE:

Oh, plenty of people hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Not writing a book. I'm not interested in it. Is there something that you don't like to do that you don't get all kind of…

ELISE:

That drives me crazy.

Yeah. I mean, I've definitely let cooking. I like cooking fine, but I've dropped that and just let my family subsist on subpar food. They can forage, it's fine, they can forage, but yeah, my friend Courtney, who's a coach, what does she say, the three Ds when it comes to something that feels like a full body, no, that's that level of drudgery or you have that much internal resistance, it's delegate it, drop it or do it differently, and so I think about that all the time too and part of do it differently for me for things that I can't delegate and there are a lot of things that I can't delegate is relaxing, which is very hard work, Catherine, I'm not going to lie, but relaxing my own standards about what I'm supposed to be doing and what it's supposed to look like.

KATHERINE:

Yeah. I always ask myself the question, how can I resource this so that it's better for me? I'm allowed to not do some things that I don't like doing. You can't always, but I have found that in most cases I can buy an app or something. There's often just a little thing that can improve it. I've just started a new email app and that's making me quite happy.

I always forget to say this, but I work really hard on my Substack and I love it. I found having the discipline of a weekly newsletter I thought I was going to hate and I really, really love it because actually that does help me to drop my standards of complete perfection. I've just got to get something out to people, and that leavens the conversation such a lot. It's not me going, oh, I've just got to make this sentence really perfect. It's like, no, I'm going to say something and get it out on time, and I love that. I love that conversation that you get to have with the people reading it that's so immediate, so I worked really hard on that. I've been saying this for about six months now. I'm finishing a book, finishing the next book. I really don't write books in a linear way, and it's taken me such a long time to really accept that in myself. I have to go down a load of blind alleys and get frustrated and get really despairing, and I'm learning that that's my process. It has finally, I think, come clear to me and I think it will be finished quite soon and it'll be out in 2026, so yeah, I'm deep, deep, deep into that at the moment.

ELISE:

That is very exciting. I also love my Substack.

KATHERINE:

It's lovely.

ELISE:

It's the best. I love it, and for me also to going to earlier in our conversation, we were talking about file cabineting ideas. It's also a place where I work through things that I'm thinking about and it's interesting to see what's really resonant and what's not. That necessarily guides what I write about in books, but it is, and it also, all those blind alleys that you're talking about, it love that it also becomes a little bit of a, oh, this is a newsletter. It doesn't have to be a core theme of this book. Yeah, it's really nice.

KATHERINE:

Less waste, less sense of waste, and just that actually one of the things I love about it is it lets me just write in a slightly different mode. I'm always aiming for really perfect poetry in my books and I still feel like books are really special and that you should make them as just beautiful as you can and as timeless as you can. Whereas writing a newsletter lets me speak in a much more direct tone, actually, maybe a bit bossy sometimes. I love, I am bossy. I'm not going to, there was this whole thing going around the internet ages ago of don't say that girls are bossy. It's like, no, I'm bossy. I'm owning that. I'm owning the full spectrum of the meaning of that, but it's sometimes obnoxious and sometimes really helpful. It's both and it's fine, and yeah, it is so nice to be able to shift voices. Actually, I find that really pleasurable.

ELISE:

I just want to say in defense of the word posse, I was leading a workshop with this woman, Courtney, and we were saying things in different voices and then just noticing in our bodies what it feels like. When you hear that and the bossy sort of boss is so incredibly relaxing to my nervous system. There's something about that's interesting, certainty being it or receiving it.

Receiving it, the certainty, the clearer articulation of what someone wants and the decisiveness is deeply relaxing because then I'm not trying to navigate through what are you actually really saying and what do you want that you're not standing for and what's the direction, and it's very, very reassuring.

KATHERINE:

I mean's the luxury of not having to make a decision at every point. I was talking about exactly this about children the other day that we spend a lot of time trying to honor their feelings, which is great, but there are moments when your kids just really need you to say, this is what we're doing, this is how we're doing it. We're going to use minimal words and it'll be over really quickly. It makes it much easier if nobody has to acknowledge their feelings at this moment. You just need to brush your teeth. We're not talking about it, and as you say, sometimes when people just tell you what to do, you're like, thank you. I don't have to think this through. I think so much all of my writing is thinking stuff through at other moments. I just want you to tell me exactly what to do. Thank you.

ELISE:

It's like all praise the person on the family trip with all the people or the adult with all the adults who's like, I made a dinner reservation and this is where we're going, and I actually ordered in advance. I mean, well, then we can with decisiveness and clarity, the pruning of decisions. We can go winter there. Oh God, I love Katherine May and I love all of her work. I treasure each and every one of her books and I will of course include links to our other podcast conversations below. I just wanted to read to one last section from wintering. As I walk, I remind myself of the words of Alan Watts. To hold your breath is to lose your breath In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget, that life is by nature, uncontrollable, that we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life.

Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth. Here he is again, running away from fear. Is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave as scared? If the mind is in pain, the mind is in pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape for watts. The only moment we can depend on is the present that which we know and sense right now, the past is gone, the future to which we devote so much of our brain. Power is an unstable element, entirely unknowable, a willow, the wisp that ever alludes our grasp. When we endlessly ruminate over distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment.