Wintering includes a lot of information about winter as in the season, but as the subtitle “The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” suggests, the message encompasses more. Katherine May offers a persuasive view that life is cyclical, success followed by misfortune, stress followed by rest. So instead of working, working and working, we need to embrace quieter seasons. In the North especially, people have been forced to do so because of the harshness of winter. As a Finn, I found her view of the Nordic countries a bit shallow and the message kind of obvious, but Wintering was a nice read nonetheless.

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider”