What Happens When You Winter Through Summer
On finding yourself 'seasonally unsynced'.
Summer has a confidence about it. A kind of loud, bullish confidence. One that arrives convinced it knows exactly how we’d all like to spend the next few months. Mildly arrogant, heavily opinionated about what we should be doing, and how we should be spending our time to ensure ‘maximum summer living’. Outside. Brightly. Vibrantly. Full weekends. Endless days. Crowds. People. Packed calendars. Travel. Memories. Making all the memories.
And this year, after weeks of relentless heat, it feels louder than ever, because summer is a season that thrives on visibility. Being seen, being heard, and therefore assumes we want to be seen and heard along with it.
Every sunny day arrives carrying the same quiet instruction:
Don’t. Waste. It.
A mere whisper that seems to gather pace as the day unfolds. Growing louder with every load of washing, every email answered, every hour that slips by without you feeling you’ve properly met the day. That you haven’t ‘made the most’.
Which, in truth, having spent months in the darker days of a winter that saw endless rain and afternoons disappearing before you’d even finished work, you can kind of get its point. But it can leave you feeling surprisingly lonely and confused, as if you’re somehow doing summer wrong, especially when the season outside doesn’t quite match the one within.
I’ve often thought I’m somehow wired more for the in-between seasons instead. Preferring spring and autumn. Those transitional seasons, the ones that don’t shout quite so loudly.
Spring offers that fresh possibility without demanding anything in return. Autumn gives us permission to wipe the slate clean and retreat. To light candles. To pull on another layer. To cosy up that bit earlier.
Summer, on the other hand, asks us to expand. To step outside and be bold, be available, be spontaneous. To become bigger somehow.
More sociable. More adventurous. More impulsive. Saying yes to everything and anything because “it’s too nice to stay indoors”. As though a life well lived should naturally spill out into the sunshine and be on show.
I grew up in the late 80s and 90s, when six weeks of summer holidays felt hedonistically endless. The rule was simple: get outside. Don’t come in until it’s dark.
Staying in to watch television on a sunny day bordered on sacrilege. My mum would throw open the back doors and thrust us (I’m the eldest of five) out from the moment we were up, to jump through sprinklers, ride bikes, entertain ourselves, make dens, and eat all meals on a blanket because, apparently, that was a picnic and picnics were how all summer meals should be consumed.
I sometimes wonder whether that message lodged itself somewhere deep inside me. That sunshine must always be used. Sunny days MUST be lived to the fullest.
Seasonally unsynced
The trouble is, our inner lives rarely pay much attention to the calendar. It doesn’t care what season you’re in if inside feels like winter.
Life admin doesn’t disappear because it’s July. Hormones don’t give a shit it’s summer (or maybe they do, and get a kick out of making you sweat in ways you didn’t think possible). That thing you’ve been quietly waiting for doesn’t suddenly land because the evenings are lighter. Anxious tendencies don’t politely disappear for the summer. Neither does uncertainty.
Sometimes the world asks us to live like it’s summer, while something inside us is still asking for winter. Maybe not an entire snow day. But a little winter. A little more shelter. A little more quiet. And in doing so leaves us seasonally unsynced.
I’ve often felt that, for many reasons, I quietly winter through summer. Some years a whole lot heavier and more than others. But this year, maybe just feeling more reflective than usual, not travelling at the same pace as the rest of the world. And not always because life has felt bleaker or a struggle. But because your energy is being spent somewhere the world can’t see.
Holding something together.
Waiting.
Healing.
Adjusting.
Simply making it through a chapter that is asking more of you than anyone else realises. And while you’re quietly doing that, summer carries on as though everyone has the same capacity to meet it. The world spills outside, and somehow expects us to spill out with it.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve never quite felt truly at home in the performance of summer. A slight unease, which, in truth, is probably more to do with not functioning in anything over 27 degrees. And it’s not because I don’t love the season. I do.
I love how my garden looks. How delicious a simple salad can taste. How transformative a swim in the sea can feel, washing away any woes. And the sunsets. Oh, the sunsets.
But loving a season isn’t always the same as having the capacity to keep pace with it.
Meeting summer where I am
Summer plans have a habit of arriving like instructions. But this summer I’m allowing summer to meet me where I am, rather than feeling I have to keep up with it.
Recently, I heard Maggie Rogers say that she’s having a “big sports summer”, and just being part of the crowd.
I loved that phrase.
Not because she’d suddenly reinvented herself, but because she’d found her own way into the season. Amongst others, without fanfare, without performance. A rhythm that belonged to her.
I’ve found myself searching for my own version of that too. Watching hours of tennis without feeling guilty for sitting still or being unproductive ~ you don’t see the crowd at Wimbledon questioning what they’re doing with their time.
Keeping a book permanently within arm’s reach.
Moving dinner outside, even if it’s only for half an hour.
A jug of flowers on the table simply because it makes an ordinary Tuesday dinner feel like I’ve made more of an effort.
Driving to the beach for an hour or two instead of believing it has to become an entire day. (Beach days somehow feel like the benchmark of a good summer, but I’ve realised mere beach hours can be just as restorative.)
Making a cup of tea at the same time each afternoon, simply to sit in the warmth for ten quiet minutes before carrying on with my day.
Walking the dog earlier (I’m not a natural early riser and require two cups of tea to function!), so I can savour a little slice of silence before the rest of the world starts emailing, calling, expecting. Tiny rituals that don’t ask me to become someone different. But let me into this season in a way that fits.
Living out of season
Perhaps that’s the thing I’ve been learning lately.
We don’t have to experience a season in the way the world tells us to. We don’t have to match its volume or its pace. We don’t have to mistake busyness for aliveness. Or visibility for participation.
Sometimes finding summer isn’t about squeezing every last drop from it. What a pressure! Especially on the days when your body could do with a nap.
It’s about noticing what you need. Even if that’s just the best of summer for a few moments in your day or week.
How might that look?
Low-effort ways to let summer find you.
~ The sun on your face while you drink your first cup of caffeine.
~ A chapter read beneath an open window.
~ Your feet in a bucket of ice-cold water.
~ A juicy punnet of strawberries on the beach/by the river/next to a body of water!
~ A sunny drive with the windows down, your favourite album blaring.
~ A short swim, a quick paddle.
~ A breeze that catches the curtains just before bedtime as you throw those windows open.
~ A blanket and your lunch count as a picnic.
~ Lying on said blanket and looking at the sky.
Perhaps that’s enough. On some days, I think it probably is.
Perhaps a meaningful summer isn’t the one that looks fullest from the outside, or even feels it on the inside. Perhaps it’s simply the one that leaves enough room for your own season to exist within it, without competition.
Because wintering through summer isn’t failing at the season. It’s simply honouring the one you’re actually living. Even if, this year, you’re quietly wintering your way through summer, you’re still living it.
Cíara x
