The 'Beginning of a Movement' With Katherine May
This is the fifth in a Q&A series available to paid subscribers of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. Know someone who might like this newsletter? Forward them the subscribe link here.
Has there ever been a more January January in the history of Januarys? Not for me, there hasn’t. This month has really tested me, so when I began transcribing my early December interview with author Katherine May this week, I was once again reminded of this month’s invitation: A time not to do, but to simply be. As uncomfortable as that is.
I wrote in a prior edition of my free newsletter about Katherine’s uber-bestselling book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. That this book has proved so popular is a hopeful thing, I think. It shows that many people are hungry to live in a different way. One where periods of rest and gestation are as valued as output and productivity. It shows that living in a way that honors natural cycles — those that are intrinsic to nature and to our own bodies — is a sensible and maybe even radical way to organize one’s life right now. If capitalism wants linear growth, we the people want to take a nap and come back to things a bit later.
After the success of her book, Katherine, I’m sure, is rather tired of talking about winter. So I’m happy to say this was an expansive conversation that strayed into the dearth of spirituality in public intellectual life, the structural versus the individual, our shared fear of falling into harmful conspiracies online, and how make a long term plan so that your life isn’t so damn busy.
I’m so grateful to Katherine for talking to me and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It’s been edited for clarity and length.
Rosie: Your book is about winter but I really read it as a book about cycles. About how life doesn’t necessarily get easier, but it does start to make a lot more sense when we pay attention to those cycles, be it the seasons, composting, the breath, menstruation — you name it. And yet, everything I’ve been taught about success and ambition and career is in total opposition to these natural systems, totally linear. I wonder how you respond to that?
Katherine: I spent a long part of my life thinking that life ought to be linear. And it’s really interesting how telling ourselves a different story about it helps us perceive it differently. Because actually there are very few things in our lives that actually are linear. Except for the progress between birth and death.
Most things within life are cyclical or circular. Circular means that some things are exactly the same all the time, and that’s true of loads of things we live through. And cyclical kind of gives us that sense of progress as well.
How is it that we’ve managed to live through this stretch called a year, through four seasons that we understand, and yet we don’t see our lives as fundamentally cyclical?
R: It strikes me that you could have written a book about summering, or autumn. Each season has its own invitation that it gives us.
K: I like to tell this story of the Oak King and the Holly King which were a very common set of presiding deities in northern Europe for a very long time. The Oak King presided over the summer and he was associated with burgeoning growth, change, extroversion — everything feeling quite feverish and associated with the creation of new things. And the Holly King presided over the dark half of the year and he was associated with that kind of gestational period, recuperating, with consolidating the work we’d done in summer, resting, reflecting, and drawing inwards.
We need both, but we only acknowledge one and explicitly reject the other. And what I find particularly interesting about that balance is that it flies in the face of the way we often talk about balance now. We often imply that we’ve got to be finding the perfect equilibrium all the time. And that’s not how humans work, we swing between extremes and I don’t mind that at all.
R: You wrote an Instagram caption a while ago about the trend of cold water swimming — which you’re a big proponent of — and how some people overdo it to the point of harming themselves (and their kids!). I wonder if you think this dynamic is just as simple as capitalism training us to override ourselves and push through the pain. So our inclination is to go to the extreme right away. Is there something that’s just human about that? Or do you think it’s an artifact of our culture?
K: I think it’s a discipline that we are lacking, a way of thinking about the world that we need to practice and train ourselves in. We constantly tell people to push things further. We tell people they have to have a unique selling point as human beings, a brand. And everything has to be worthy of putting on Instagram, so that means if you do this beautiful thing of swimming in the wild, suddenly you have to say, “I swam further or lasted longer than everyone else.” And wow, it makes us so intensely unhappy to do that.
It comes back to that idea of linearity, we’ve absorbed this idea that there has to be constant growth in our society and that we can never just stay contented with one thing. In the workplace you have to constantly be seeking promotion and earning more and more. And if you do a sport then you have to get better and better rather than finding your running pace and staying there.
I’m sure it’s connected to capitalism, it’s quite patriarchal, there’s always this hierarchy. But it’s also us and us personally. I do think there comes a point where we have to stop looking at those bigger systems and start looking at our own individual egos and how we crave being better than other people.
R: Yes. I like how you point out that it is an interplay between these structures and systems that we are all beholden to and also our own personal drivers and egos. I do sense sometimes that in these kinds of conversations, especially on the left, we can only talk about the structural stuff. Whereas it’s always in interplay of both
K: Yeah and that’s about the absence of a spiritual — I don’t know if that’s the right word — a bigger moral and ethical framework that forces us to look inwards and not constantly outwards to blame other people. But instead to question our own moral code and the way that we’re perceiving ourselves, and thinking about other people and whether we’re asking tough enough questions of our own behavior
R: I loved how you wrote about fully accepting the fundamental unpredictability of life — even if you can only do it in these tiny snatches of awareness when you can take in the full enormity of that truth. It seems to me that some people are better at accepting that than others. I wonder if that’s something we can learn, that we can cultivate?
K: I do think you can, I do think it’s a practice. It comes back to having a framework where you can think about that, and that opens up possibilities. The Buddhist framework for example is really useful for thinking about how impotent we are and how out of control we are and how surrendering to what life brings to us is actually the only way that we can cope and truly be happy and defeat suffering. It’s that illusion of control that makes life so painful for us, because we’re constantly trying to wrestle life into submission and therefore we punish ourselves and other people.
R: I do feel like that broader spiritual framework where you find that acceptance is something that’s so missing in public intellectual life. It’s almost sneered by very smart, analytical people. I sometimes feel like I have to choose: Either I am a spiritual person or I am a smart, clever person. You can’t be both.
K: We really disapprove of people seeking and trying to make themselves happy and I do find that such a frustrating instinct in [our] culture.
R: This newsletter project that I’m doing is in part because I could feel myself shutting that part of myself down, and I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted to figure out a way to do both. To use my big brain but also leave some room for mystery and leave room for something bigger than what’s strictly in a peer reviewed paper.
K: And stuff that’s more intuitive that can still sit alongside stuff that’s empirical and peer reviewed. Why does there have to be that divide?
The problem is we’re really anxious about all that at the moment because of the sheer level of irrationality that’s happening out in the world. So you kind of think “If I become more intuitive myself am I going to accidentally fall into a kind of anti-vax space?”
R: I’ve had those fears in the last year too, I really have.
K: I’ve been writing about that in my new book. I’m struck over and over again by this paranoia of writing about pursuing a more spiritual existence because of all the irrational stuff that’s going on. I don’t want anyone to think I think like that. But also I don’t want myself to fall into a trap of thinking I can make up my own rules.
R: I don’t think it’s a thinking trap. I think it’s very much shaped by these algorithms. If you follow one person who, let’s say they got the vaccine but they are anti big pharma or something, then more of that is served up to you. Your ability to hold nuance is still there, but the algorithm starts testing you more and more and more. I can sense it trying to find my line, trying to almost push it further and further into places I don’t want to go.
K: [You’re] tested as well by other people’s reactions. Social media does not lend itself to nuance and detail. It’s about proclaiming. I worry that it stops me talking about the more subtle thoughts that I have. Because I know that if I say “I’m worried about big pharma,” 20 people will tweet me to say “are you anti-vax?” and I’m like — I can hold both thoughts at once. We all can but we’re training ourselves out of being able to do that.
R: I’m so relieved to hear someone else has had these same anxieties. I thought it was just me.
I think my favorite passage from the book was when you described how your life felt when you were very busy. That the years were a blur and “strangely devoid of meaning except for a clawing sense of survival.” You were basically describing my pre-Covid life. If anything motivates me right now, it’s figuring out how to not get there again. I wonder, what’s your advice for people who are there and don’t want to be, or don’t want to go back?
K: I think the question is how do you hold onto that insight because it’s a true one and how do you trust yourself to know that actually, you’re doing something for your own good here rather than running away. Because that’s what loads of people will tell you about that instinct: that actually it’s you trying to escape hard work or you’re lazy or not being realistic.
To do that we need a bigger return to our instinct anyway. There’s a sense that we’ve been overriding it for so long that we don’t know how to trust our feelings and the very valid feedback they’re giving us about how bad that life is for us.
These aren’t decisions that you can make quickly. They’re not simple acts of running away because we still have to look after ourselves, pay rent, eat. We need a way to help people to plan carefully and slowly. I think it’s important to hold those two timescales in mind. Like what can I do immediately to alleviate the stress that I’m under and what plans can I start making over the next one to three to five years that will ultimately take me to the lifestyle that I want.
There’s strength in numbers here. It’s the beginning of a movement away from the life we were sold in the 20th century and into a more 21st century, new way of doing it.
R: You’re so right that it is a process. I feel like the last year of my life has been an unravelling of that former life. Small decisions, big decisions — but it’s all in this new direction of travel. But it wasn’t just about quitting my journalism job, it’s about training myself, before I commit to something, to really ask: “How is that going to feel?” It’s not about how it looks or how good it would be for my career.
K: I had to go through this process when I got my autism diagnosis and really realize I’d been harming myself for a long time. [To realize] that the patterns I’d been in since my teens of getting really sick every few years because I was so exhausted were caused directly by the decisions I was making. The way I was pressuring myself to go along with invitations that, if I stopped to reflect for a moment, I knew weren’t the right thing for me to do. It really takes time to retrain your intuition about that. It’s taken me years to start to learn how to plan my calendar better so I can carry on coping.
R: I’ve realized through this project that what I’m searching for most right now is not a successful life, not an impressive life, fast life, luxurious life — but a meaningful life. And meaning comes from experiencing the dark and the light, sorrow and joy, cold and hot. That duality was really evident in your book. So I wanted to ask you where you find the most meaning in your life right now?
K: Definitely in my family. I have a son who’s nine and my husband who I’ve been with for a very long time. It’s so easy to de-center them in my life because in lots of ways they’re the least demanding thing in my world, they’ll keep bending to fit in with what I’m doing, so I repeatedly remind myself that they are what I structure my time around. Not work. Therefore that makes it quite easy to set those boundaries.
R: I like that you had such an assured answer there. You can barely get through a conversation these days without someone saying how f’d up the world is. And while that may be true, there is still so much meaning to be found day to day in the world as it is right now. In these places we’re talking about.
K: And I’d go further, I think it’s the lazy way out to obsess over how screwed up the world is. I can’t afford to do that because I have a child who’s going to outlive me hopefully and so no, I reject that idea that everything is screwed, I’m not having it. I’m going to keep trying to make a better world that he’s going to live in and he’s going to improve it even more. Because he’s much more aware and clever and conscious than I’ll ever be.
You can follow Katherine May on Twitter, Instagram, and Substack. She also has a podcast called the “Wintering Sessions.”