Embrace winter, ditch Instagram

Substack : winter :: Instagram : spring

Hendrick Averkamp, Winter Scene on a Canal, 1615

Winter is a magical time of serenity and calm contemplation. Don’t be in such a rush to usher it out.

What’s the hurry?

I was asked the other day about the difference between Instagram and Substack. I hardly knew how to answer, and this is the best I could come up with:

On Instagram everyone is miserable but pretending otherwise, desperate for spring to arrive. On Substack, we’re happy to wallow in our self-deprecating misery and love the cosy comforts of winter and don’t want it to end.

Alja Brunova

agreed:

It’s perfect reading weather. You don’t need an excuse to stay indoors and snuggle up with a good book or film, a wintry cocktail, a glass of stout, red wine, coffee, comfort food (stews, pies, sweets) and a roaring fire (nice if I had one). You can wear comfy pajamas all the time and big woolly socks. You can stay at home, guilt-free. You can eat and drink to your heart’s content.

Here’s another nice way of putting it, from

Hannah Kasulka

:

A time for cosy reflection

“Winter, for me, is a period of reflection and regeneration, of withdrawal, reminiscent of a time when humans were forced to be more malleable and responsive to the seasons. Each year, I long to see the landscape around my home in Germany transformed by the cold: frost-limned trees, crisp air, and snow shrouding everything, muffling every sound, as if covering over the acoustic evidence of humanity.”
Winter is a time of regeneration: we’ll miss it when it’s gone (aeon)

Speaking of Germany, winter is a time for Gemütlichkeit – a fabulous word roughly translated as ‘snugness, warmth, the feeling that you are accepted’, according to Nick Hunt, in Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn.

(Longtime readers will know of my affinity for Paddy Leigh Fermor, who at the age of 18, set off from Hook of Holland and walked all the way to Istanbul. Both Fermor, in 1933, and Hunt, in 2011, set off on their adventures at the start of winter.)

Winter is an ideal time for discovering new cities. When travelling to a new place, I love making my first visit in the winter. There is something so alluring and enchanting about visiting cities in the deepest, darkest frost of winter. The bleakness, the forlornness, the mystery and intrigue and the endless quest for the undiscovered nooks and crannies is one of life’s great underrated pleasures.

Some of my most vivid memories come from cities in winter, especially the ones I visited or stayed in for only a short time. There are images indelibly sketched onto my mind:

• traipsing home at 3am in a crisp -30 degrees in the freshly snowy cobbled streets of Lviv amidst magnificent yet precariously crumbling buildings, translucent street lamps hovering hauntingly, the streets desolately deserted.

• ambling through a snowy Riga, marvelling at its eclectic mix of toweringly imposing medieval, Gothic, and Baroque buildings, as well as its trademark Art Nouveau architecture with the grotesque masks staring menacingly at you amongst intricate floral designs and elaborate geometric forms adorning the façades.

• ephemerally stumbling in a tipsy midday haze in the foggy fug of Kraków from bar to bar with a burgeoning love interest, trying to make out the misty shape of Wawel Castle in the murky distance, as day blends into night blends into day.

There’s a comfortingly forlorn and elegiac feel to these experiences, which makes them all the more powerful. No other season can bring on such vividly intense emotions.

“My breath poured out like steam from a ventilation shaft, and when I thought of the approaching cold a feeling of sheer lonely delight almost overwhelmed me. ‘Vague speculation thrives in weather like this,’ wrote Paddy. ‘The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years.”
Nick Hunt, Walking the Woods and the Water

Familiarity breeds contempt

Almost any city, unless we’re talking about Lagos or Riyadh, is lovely in the summer (“It’s so lovely in the summer!” is one of my biggest bugbears). A truly magical city is mesmerising in winter.

But when you’ve lived somewhere for more than a year, the frustrations of winter make themselves more manifest. Eight winters in Boston and thirteen in Kyiv had their moments, but it’s hard to escape the images of slushy grimy grit, and the slipping and sliding that comes with it. This is especially the case in a city that does such a lousy job of clearing streets and pavements, and where deadly icicles dangle perilously from the rooftops, waiting to impale those who walk underneath. In short, where public safety is an afterthought (more a feature of Kyiv than Boston).

All the more reason to stay inside as much as possible and soak up the cosiness.

Spring has its charms and moments, but I’m afraid I’m no fan. The weather is so inconsistent. It’s hard to figure out what to wear since there’s no knowing what each day will bring. Dressing a child in the early morning is a nightmare of indecision. There’s pressure to make the most of the nice days, when they arrive. There’s the guilt of staying indoors with copious cups of coffee and yet another book when beautiful spring weather is beckoning me outdoors.

There’s wind and rain – and that nasty, spitting rain, not the thunderous, powerful force of nature that I experienced during the rainy season in Nigeria, where I soon grew to love and appreciate the force of a torrid downpour – sandwiched in between occasionally spring-like days.

There’s the fact that spring has seemed to just about disappear, and we now have a drawn-out, indecisive winter that can’t quite let go of itself to fully embrace spring and then before you know it…it’s in the high 20s/low 30s and the summer is here. Is there even a spring anymore?

Winter: the weather may be horrid at times, but it’s fairly predictable, at least the cold part of it. And you can always plan for the cold.

As the old year ends and the new one arrives, as we say goodbye to the holidays and a return to some semblance of normality, our time for reflection and regeneration has an expiration date. Don’t will it to go faster. Don’t will time away. Appreciate every moment, bleakness be damned.

I know people love spring and summer and that my take on winter may alienate some, and my disdain for spring might piss others off. But surely the reason you love spring and summer so much is because of the stark contrast they provide from winter? So go ahead and love your springs and summers but learn to appreciate the beauty and warmth of winter too. Much like attempting to achieve a constant state of happiness, we need to experience the doldrums of doom and gloom to truly embrace and appreciate the euphoria of happiness and summer. It, and we, can’t be sunny and chirpy all the time.

“[T]he experience of real, unbridled cold is what lets me relish the warmth and release of summer. In a sense, both seasons depend on each other. Albert Camus reminds us of this dialectic of seasonal anticipation: ‘In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’”¹

So go on, welcome the spring and summer if you like. But don’t be in such a rush to say goodbye to winter. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

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In case you missed it

This little 5-minute video demonstrates how I use Instapaper to read many of my web articles (not only Substack).

Use Instapaper to improve your Substack reading experience

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1. Winter is a time of regeneration: we’ll miss it when it’s gone | Aeon Ideas