Honoring Seasons

It’s cold and dark here. The days start more slowly and end more quickly. There is something magical about experiencing a place as winter emerges. The trees are bare, the perennials are dead, and the animals seem to have a sense of urgency. Everything is vulnerable, and the landscape feels stripped to its essential form. Even the sunrises and sunsets have a stark feel to them:

Wintering

This environment brings to mind Wintering, a beautiful book about “the power of rest and retreat in difficult times”. It reminds us to honor the seasons of our life and embrace periods of darkness, solitude, and rest.

These challenging times can be seasons of renewal when transformation and new life are born:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”1

By first recognizing how life is cyclical:

“To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard.

And, trusting that progress will emerge as we continue this repeating journey:

To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made.

I’ve come to appreciate how this applies across all areas of my life. I used to think the ideal was often to be the same all the time: same routine, same habits, same diet, etc. Activities like gardening, parenting, and meditating have opened my eyes to how much of life is cycling through repeating patterns. Starting a business and helping other business owners highlighted how these principles apply to organizations as they navigate the seasons of their industry and the economy. The greatest risk arises if we “fight the winter” and don’t adapt to the environment around us.

Dormancy in Fitness

This idea of cycling through seasons is especially relevant to fitness.

Many people imagine an exercise routine where they always do the same workouts, at the same intensity, and see the same results. The expectation is continual progress toward their goals.

The reality is almost always different. Life throws us challenges. Work gets in the way. Family takes priority. Sickness, travel, or something unexpected sets us back.

We try to grind through despite the additional stress. Our enjoyment dips. Our progress stagnates. We might even get hurt or move backward.

We’re fighting nature. We’re being rigid instead of adapting to the season we’re in. We fear dialing back will derail us when it’s pushing through that truly sets us up to fail. The real benefits and gains from exercise accrue slowly over time. Our ability to sustain our effort over many years is far more valuable than our ability to maintain intensity in every season.

The best examples of this are the people training with the highest stakes. Professional athletes take time to rest in the off-season. Elite weightlifters, bodybuilders, and runners embrace periodization:

Periodization is the planned manipulation of training variables (load, sets, and repetitions) in order to maximize training adaptations and to prevent the onset of overtraining syndrome2

This approach has been shown to be the optimal strategy even with elite competitors who structure their lives to minimize stress and maximize recovery.3 It's even more important for the rest of us who face the oscillating intensity of daily life.

There are periods in our lives when the best thing we can do for our fitness is to enter a season of dormancy. Suspend our normal routine. Dial the effort back. Slow down. Adapt to our current conditions. Conserve our energy. And position ourselves to reemerge in the next season with fresh life.

The Fertile Void

These ideas connect to a theme that I've come to appreciate deeply: The Fertile Void. The term comes from the world of Gestalt Therapy founded by Fritz Perls who believed in a “cycle of the interdependency of organism and environment.”4

I’ll write more on this concept as I continue to explore it in my own life, but these visualizations of the Gestalt Cycle of Experience capture the essence:

By honoring the cyclical seasons and withdrawing when necessary, we create a space that is ripe for new life and activity to emerge.