The fallow season
More thoughts on solitude
I’ve been mulling over something a friend said when we were home in December. She was talking about how mid-winter is actually the worst time to commit to the level of busyness and change demanded of us by the holidays and New Year’s resolutions. The business of change and transformation requires more energy than we have to spare in the cold, dark months when our mammalian brains are telling us to rest.
Now, just a few weeks ago I wrote about my love for New Year’s resolutions and lists and ambitious goals. I have a hard time understanding how others don’t find this motivating. And yes, I’m a Capricorn, how did you guess? But I’m ruled more by an inherent nervous energy and a residual Catholic guilt than the planet Saturn. Even so, I can admit (begrudgingly) that while structure and praise and gamification really do it for me, that may not be the healthiest way to approach your life. It’s likely what led me to burnout in the first place.
So as my friend talked about our tendency to overcommit in these low-energy months, I found myself surprisingly receptive to the idea. I used to teach yoga. I miss it and I don’t. But back in 2019 I started an advanced teacher training, led by this same friend. A few months in, I quit drinking and a few months after that the pandemic hit. It was a tumultuous time, personally and at large. I feel like I keep coming back to this time and I’m not doing it on purpose, but it was an inflection point. Anyway this is all to say I was feeling very unmoored at this point. Untethered was the word that came to me over and over that year.
It seems clear in hindsight that I was doing what most people do when they feel lost: I was looking for guidance, I was looking for someone to show me the way. I’d followed the map I was given — school, school, more school, work — but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d arrived at the wrong destination and I couldn’t trust the map anymore, I needed a new one. There’s the annoying idea that we each have to make our own map. Maybe we borrow bits and pieces from others, but ultimately we have to be our own cartographers. Corny and cliche, but un/fortunately true.
Some people can hurl themselves into the unknown, figuring it out as they go, not caring if there’s a pre-laid path for them to follow. I’m far too nervous for that, so I dug in. I observed and plotted and stewed and wallowed. I made goals, I made lists — many, many lists. I sought (but did not necessarily attain) clarity or sense of purpose. I rested. I retreated inward. Others can inspire us but figuring out what we want, deep down, is a solitary endeavor and a little loneliness is perhaps to be expected when you go into an instinctual period of hibernation.
A little loneliness isn’t always a bad thing. Bad feelings can even be beneficial. Sometimes they’re necessary, healthy, productive, transformative. Sometimes they’re nourishing — the bitter medicine that leads us back to health. Sometimes they remind us that we’re alive. Sometimes the hurt is good, sometimes the hurt is our only connection to the thing that made us hurt and we’re not ready to sever the tie. Of course we can overdo it and then it becomes a concern, but there’s often quite a bit of gray area surrounding this tipping point.
What I’m getting at is this: yes, I am sometimes quite sad about the lonely state I find myself in, having gone into hiding for several years and emerged to find that a thriving social life wasn’t waiting for me. But why would it be? I purposefully neglected to cultivate one. I was working with limited energy and needed all that energy directed inward. But it’s totally possible to be both sad and grateful for the outcome of this self-inflicted isolation.
Maybe isolation is the wrong word, with its negative valence. It was more of a fallow season — a time of regeneration and restoration and incubation. My hibernation era. A healthy and necessary phase of the cycle spent coaxing the nascent seeds of my new self into being, protecting them as they took root. A recalibration where I learned what it was that I even needed. I’m just at a point now where I’m skirting the line between “alone” and “lonely”, where “solitude” is veering into “seclusion”.
Sometimes it helps me to remember that we’re just animals with big ideas. Our brains and bodies exist in an often uneasy alliance, with very different demands and desires and ideas of what’s best for us. I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that our bodies actually wield more influence and when we neglect the needs of our bodies, that’s when things really go awry. There’s no thinking or reasoning or arguing our way out of that.
So we have these bodies with their inconvenient needs and sometimes those needs include digging into a safe, dark hole and playing dead. We don’t need to know why, we’re just overwhelmed with the urge to do it. And why shouldn’t our reemergence be a little painful? Gaunt and desperate and blinking at the world. Daunted by the prospect of having to participate in our own lives again. Stirring from a deep (but not dreamless) slumber. The propulsion to do so is just another natural and undeniable impulse, another phase of the cycle, equal in force to the demand for retreat.
We leave a part of ourselves in the hollow, laid to rest, maybe forever. There’s pain in that parting, but there’s joy too. There’s a thrill to it — to being alive to ourselves again with a sharp hunger for the world. A desire that wouldn’t have been possible without first the deprivation, a want that wouldn’t have been recognizable without the lack. We’ll slink back here eventually, to our hibernation den, maybe in a year or 10 or 30, whenever we’ve had enough, whenever we’ve gorged so much on the world that we’re sick of it.
But the job now is to gorge — to touch and taste and take it all in until we couldn’t possibly take anymore, to embrace our place in the cycle — and ensure we have the nourishment we need to see ourselves through the leaner days to come. And the leaner days will come. They will inevitably, thankfully come. If we do it right, we will greet them with a satisfied sigh of relief as we climb back down into our holes and pull the dirt down with us, dreaming of rest and renewal, dreaming already of the day we’ll reemerge, hungry for more.
This week’s song on repeat
Oh, when it, it all ends again
What if I tell you that
You'll be playing in my head
'Cause you're a summer hit
I'm singing it
