FLOUR ISH
How to
in fallow times
O
ver the course of my life, I have
often fallen between the cracks.
Seasons of illness, anxiety and
depression have propelled me
out of the everyday world
that’s full of busy, and into
a place where
I’m hidden
from view for
a season. Each time, I’ve had to scramble
to recover. Each time, I’ve returned to
normal life feeling as though I’ve lost ground.
But, last year, I wrote a book about coming
to terms with this cycle. Even welcoming
and celebrating this state of being. I called
it wintering. It is a fallow period in life
when you’re cut off from the world, feeling
side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into
the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from
an illness; a life event, such as a bereavement
or birth of a child; a humiliation or failure.
Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and
have temporarily fallen between two worlds.
Some winterings creep up on us more
slowly, accompanying the protracted death
of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of
caring responsibilities as our parents age, the
drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are
appallingly sudden, such as discovering
one day that the entire world has gone into
lockdown. However it arrives, wintering
is usually involuntary, and always painful.
But I’ve learned to get a feel for mine: their
length and breadth, their heft. Just before my
40th birthday, I left my stressful job in higher
education and developed a mystery abdominal
illness, and my husband was rushed to hospital
with acute, life-threatening appendicitis. Feeling useless and
afraid, I hid for a while, avoiding friends and secretly suspecting
that I wasn’t ill at all, but that I was just too weak to keep up with
my job. But I also recognised that I was wintering, and I knew
this period would have a beginning, a middle and, eventually,
an end. I knew the shape of it, and I knew I could survive.Stepping out of our busy everyday lives is an anathema to most of us. But
as author Katherine May discovers, it’s in quieter times that we really grow