I’m here overlooking the frozen Humber River on the west side of Toronto, and it makes me think that wintertime really is this time of everything just stopping.
I mean, look at this river.
In any other season would be flowing, moving, rippling, and yet here, it’s like it’s frozen in time.
It’s like time itself has stopped.
And it seems like, you know, when you look at chemistry and biology, the temperature affects the speed of everything happening in life.
So that you raise the temperature, and you increase the speed of these chemical, biological reactions.
And when you bring the temperature down, especially below the freezing point of water, then you get into this kind of stasis, kind of state where we use the metaphor “frozen in time”, and it’s very fitting.
It’s hard to believe that all this water is simply just frozen into, essentially, a solid rock.
That’s what I see the winter is about.
This time where everything slows down.
All the processes of life slow down.
The world solidifies into stone.
Obviously, in the human world, everything is carrying on.
But there’s this feeling throughout the winter of this kind of frozenness, this silence, quiet, and of course, the darkness, only short eight-hour days now.
And it really is sort of a dead time of the year.
So, how can we use this as part of human life? It seems to me this is a good time to completely stop, to let everything come to a stop.
I think the warmer months are a time for action, movement, change.
The winter is a time to go inside, let everything stop, and bring everything to a stable point, work on the foundations, and get ready to start again in the new year.
I don’t know exactly how to describe it.
I wonder if any of you have any way to describe this feeling that winter brings.
It’s usually not the most pleasant time of year.
If we had to pick one season to live all the time, it certainly wouldn’t be the winter.
It’s not a time where you can enjoy being outside as much.
You have to huddle in and try to protect ourselves from the cold, most of the time.
And of course, the long darkness doesn’t lend to enjoying time in nature.
But what would it be like without a winter? There’s something that is added.
And of course, as a Canadian, this is a country known for a lot of winter.
Even though I’m in the south end of Canada, I can still call myself Canadian, and experiencing some level of the Canadian winter.
And there’s something so refreshing and renewing about having this complete stop.
So you have this phase where the whole year, the whole phase of life.
It’s like each year is like a life.
Born in the spring, it lives through flowering in the summer, bearing fruit in the fall, and then in the late fall, it dies, and the winter is this dead time, where everything can come to a stop, and then we get ready to start again.
So, while the dead time itself is not my favourite time of year, I am glad to have this time, for the chance to let things come to an end, stop the whole progress of the summer.
Let it have a natural course, die away.
Bring everything back to the basics, to the foundation.
Everything coming back to the essential things in the winter.
And then, as the light starts to return, starting to plan the adventure of the new year.