A Time for Every Purpose

Change will not stop happening.
The only part we can control is our response.
—Katherine May

The Navajo people learned a long time ago
that winter is the ultimate test of applied faith.
–Rex Lee Jim

As I mentioned in The Clock is Always Ticking…, I have been reading two books about time, and while I have obviously focused so far these past couple of posts on journalist, Oliver Burkeman’s thoughts about our modern misunderstandings about time, I want to turn now to the one that is about a distinct type of time in our lives.  But because the content of both books have informed my thinking equally—even when writing primarily about Burkeman’s ideas—I want to allow him to set the stage:

The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it—to lever ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer vulnerable to events…. [And] this dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling.  But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail…. So insecurity and vulnerability are the default state—because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundation (B, pp. 215-217).¹

That last example of inevitable change is what essayist, Katherine May would call an instance of “wintering”—those periods of brokenness and crisis where a life felt emptied of meaning forces us to find “the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and commit to healing them the best we can” (M, p. 120).  It can be a time of great sorrow and discomfort, and since “everybody winters at one time or another” (M, p. 10), I want to join May in exploring some of its properties—especially because winters play such a crucial role in both our individual and collective lives.

For starters, May wisely points out, “however it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful,” and that is why like actual winter, it is often perceived as simply a period of endurance—“nows” that are best gotten through as quickly as possible and soon, hopefully, forgotten.  But, she reminds us, “when everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs.  That’s the gift of winter:  it’s irresistible.  Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not [and] we can come out of it wearing a different coat”—which is why “amid the transformation of winter—the unwelcome change—is an abundance of life” that provides the foundation for the chance for growth.  Hence, “winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible” (M, p. 11, 121, 67, & 14). 

Our time in the crucible, though, confronts us with one of life’s more painful realities, and that is that “our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities we’re doing [and people we’re knowing] for the very last time” (B, p. 132).  The brokenness of relationship lies at the heart of all wintering, and that is what can make our winters feel so excruciatingly long and disheartening.  Yet even out of this brokenness, there lies the potential for learning because since any specific experience might be the last of that kind:

We should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if [we knew] it were the final instance.  And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.”  It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before (B, p. 133; my emphasis).

Which is why May challenges us to pay attention to our wintering:

We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of will power.  We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them.  They are real, and they are asking something of us.  We must learn to invite winter in.  We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how (p. 13; original emphasis).

Therefore,

More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring.  The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it (M, pp. 115-116).

Only by attending to our winters, she argues, can we recognize the newly forming roots within us, waiting to spring forth, and only by attending to our winters can we perceive the earlier buds we formed prior to it that will blossom us back to full life.

In addition, she emphasizes, “when you start tuning in to winter, you realize that we live through a thousand winters in our lives—some big, some small” (M, p. 117)—and that as one lives through each of them, “you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience” (B, p. 171).  Because each of us learns that we cannot force the pace of our winters, and our “reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality” (B, p. 177).  Wintering, May insists, is how we discover who we fully are.

She also believes it “offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter.”  She wants to contest our modern “habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death” as a “brutal untruth” because “life meanders like a path through the woods.  We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones.  Given time, they grow again” (M, p. 68).

Of course, the paradox is that life is both cyclical and linear, and that is why I have found the writing of both Burkeman and May so compelling and so intertwined.  As we spiral through our “nows,” we generate our meanings by what we choose to attend to and what we choose to neglect, and in so doing, we are reminded of “the sheer astonishingness of being” (B, p. 65; original emphasis), of having any time—any life—at all.  In fact, “when you turn your attention to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating [or painful experience such as wintering] in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed” (B, p. 67; original emphasis).  The miracle is that any of us are here at all.

I realize at this juncture, many readers may be wondering what does any of this have to do with education and its improvement—the proclaimed purpose of this entire project—and my short response is that our students experience winters just like we do and that one of the properties of an authentically engaged teacher (elaborated on in Chapter 2) is generating appropriately intimate rapport with them.  As teachers, we must recognize the wintering times in the children under our care, aid them in navigating them and passing on the wisdom from our own winters when appropriate through that rapport. 

But most importantly, we must remember to avoid the terrible habit so deeply ingrained in our culture of:

Looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would.  This isn’t just an unkind attitude.  It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do.  It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering.  And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held (M, p. 122).

We must never judge a student’s winter, and it is our responsibility as authentically engaged teachers to use our rapport to help them avoid judging themselves as well.  As the adults in the room, we know firsthand wintering is already challenging enough without unnecessary and ill-conceived blaming and shaming, and so we need to aid our students whenever possible in breaking the terrible habit of always seeking fault.  Most of the time there simply isn’t any; manure just happens, and we need to support them in embracing this fundamental truth.

We can also support them through their winters in our capacity as co-learners because at the heart of wintering is the problem of the human condition: we can imagine things otherwise.  Both Burkeman and May directly address this issue, but I like how May writes about it better:

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 the case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very 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” (M, pp. 232-233).

I love those words “the case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget.”  It is so tempting to want to control—especially during our winters—and by modelling our own struggle to remember one of life’s fundamental truths, sharing it with our students, seeking to learn “radical acceptance” together, we teach and empower them to do more than make it through their winters:

We teach and empower them to journey through every season of their lives.

¹Because I am quoting from both Burkeman’s and May’s work, I am using last initials for an abbreviated citation system to keep the read smoother.

Author’s Note: “A Time for Every Purpose” is the third in my series of posts on time and education. Be sure to check out “The Clock Is Always Ticking…” and “Managing ‘Now’,” and “A Modestly Meaningful Life.”

References

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  New York: Riverhead Books.