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New Year's Hope: Musings from an Old Man to a Younger World [1]
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Date: 2023-01-26
Winter Solstice, 2022 - the magical moment when the days stop getting shorter...
Do you get hit by the winter blues?
Some people feel the shortening of days more acutely. Some people think they breeze through without noticing, but for some reason, they eat more, drink more, need to go out and party more. Some folks just hide indoors, because the weather is frightful, not delightful.
Some people get addicted to their work.
Some people get hooked on their phones.
Some people just cannot get out of bed during these rapidly shortening days, and they can’t find energy to do much of anything.
When winter comes, it affects each of us uniquely. However there are patterns for how we curl up in a ball and hibernate, and to other people, especially those who are more active, it looks like we’re “depressed.”
We are not any bit of the colloquial characterization of depression. I’ve come to hate this word, because it has been overused.
There are people who marvel at the snowflake, see its magnificence, the individual way water sublimates into this perfect ornamental shape that an artist can only re-create in macroscale. There are people who like to bundle up, snuggle under the covers, and if you have a partner with whom you can enjoy indoor playtime, there’s that, too.
There are people who must work in the weather. The job is not pleasant. Nature can throw some serious and lethal punches at us. God Bless those men and women who step out to keep our modern world functioning when the icy blasts arrive and weather turns foul.
Behind the scenes of this arrival of cold and winter is a perennial event.
The earth, making yet another successful circuit around its host yellow star that we call the sun, is not quite at its closest approach in the elliptoid path, but it is at the point where our northern hemisphere is furthest away from straight light ray alignment. The sun in our sky seems to stand still, and the day length is the shortest it will be until we get back to this spot in approximately 365 more days. We move around the glowing ball of fusion energy on a 93 million mile long invisible string called gravitational force. This process has repeated for what we guess is around 4.3 billion years. From what we can tell, it seems like it will happen again, same way, same time, next year.
However, for people who get winter blues, a condition known as seasonal affect disorder, the rundown from about Thanksgiving through Christmas and perhaps until Groundhog Day on February 2, celestial mechanics is a meaningless story, no matter the evidence, and life can really be uncomfortable.
Coping skills erode.
Bad habits set in.
Lack of care and concern about one’s well-being seeps in.
Hiding under the covers isn’t for fun or play, or just because it is cold outside. Hiding is essential, because winter’s bone is permeating their mindspace.
It simply doesn’t matter to them that the process has been going on for over 4 billion years. It is happening to them here, now and their struggle with it is immediate and not an existential ennui that they’ve conjured. There are days when SAD really hurts its sufferers.
There’s so much good activity happening in winter, like the renutrification of soils, the replenishment of water tables, the cooling down of scorching summer heat, but to the person with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), everything is wrong. Misery is a constant companion. It hangs around like a big, black, unfriendly dog.
Here’s what Mayo Clinic has to offer about seasonal affective disorder: www.mayoclinic.org/…
“In most cases, seasonal affective disorder symptoms appear during late fall or early winter and go away during the sunnier days of spring and summer. Less commonly, people with the opposite pattern have symptoms that begin in spring or summer. In either case, symptoms may start out mild and become more severe as the season progresses.
Signs and symptoms of SAD may include:
Feeling listless, sad or down most of the day, nearly every day
Losing interest in activities you once enjoyed
Having low energy and feeling sluggish
Having problems with sleeping too much
Experiencing carbohydrate cravings, overeating and weight gain
Having difficulty concentrating
Feeling hopeless, worthless or guilty
Having thoughts of not wanting to live”
MayoMD also offers that winter SAD demonstrates the following symptoms:
Oversleeping
Appetite changes, especially a craving for foods high in carbohydrates
Weight gain
Tiredness or low energy
I’ll offer you a couple more resources, first, from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Mental Health: www.nimh.nih.gov/…
And also, from the Cleveland Clinic, webpage describing SAD: my.clevelandclinic.org/…
You, my reader, will find all three sites give you a similar description of signs and symptoms of SAD. I personally like the way Cleveland Clinic provides guidance, because they not only tell you what the problem is, but they tell you how to deal with it.
Different people need varying levels of support for symptoms. Some persons might need no help at all, while others may need a therapist, and yet others might need medication.
If you or someone you know or care about experiences wintertime difficulty, or you have noticed their symptoms getting worse over time, please don’t hesitate. Get them the help they need. The Columbia Lighthouse Project is only one of many ways to get help for people who truly suffer and have significant symptoms: cssrs.columbia.edu
From time to time, I’ve considered that I might have seasonal depression. When it first gets cold, I don’t seem to be uncomfortable or mind it too much, I just put on another layer of clothing. When it gets cold and dark, I work to make myself see good things and note the twinkling holiday lights, but then, “Mr. Grumpy Cat” appears. I begin to be bothered by the holiday frivolity, the overdone way in which we receive the solstice, the constant hearkening back to the Roman Saturnalia, or even more pagan practices as might have been performed by the druids.
But I’ve always been able to manage my level of discomfort.
My constant has always been that celestial mechanics has given me a quantitative way of understanding Nature’s purpose in my winter blues. Some readers might argue that I should just “get over it,” but I cannot. And I think I have finally figured it out.
A lifetime of conditioning and acceptance of our seasonal rituals also brings with it memories aplenty of people, places and things that were precious, and are now forever gone. Solstice is a humanly created commentary about something that just happens in the rest of the natural world. It is a pause in the human brain, human mindspace and human experience, while all the rest of Nature goes on about its business.
It is a human entitlement to feel awe and wonder, and far too often, we just cannot give ourselves permission…
… to put down our activities and be overwhelmed by the magnitude and majesty of a universe that goes on without a care, and lets our species, our planet and our infinite little dot on a lesser arm of the Milky Way galaxy simply exist. Other neighborhoods in space are less fortunate.
No, aliens aren’t that interested in us, wherever they exist in the multiverse. They have their own problems to solve, and we don’t matter to them. We’d love to have them visit, stop by for coffee and baked goods, chat about their travels. They don’t do that. But we keep wishing it so.
We see miracles happening, and we say those miracles are all about us, because attributing meaning to the people, places and things helps us deal with our isolation on a little blue dot. We imagine and dream of space travel, but interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic migration when we use this place up or simply get bored with it is not only far-fetched, but highly unlikely to occur in our current biological manifestation.
Winter blues are not something to hate.
It is a time to marvel at how lucky, how amazingly unique, how frustrating and aggravating and impossible to deal with we all are. It is a time for us to stop, look around, be in awe, feel, hear smell and taste this wonderful gift called being alive.
As I get ready to publish this item, the days are already getting longer, wintertime is sending a variety of difficult conditions I’ve seen before, just not in this order, and climate change is putting that icy white stuff on our roads, sidewalks, houses and cars. But the change in the nature and quality of the light after passing the solstice gave me assurance that once again, we did not fall victim to a galactic cataclysm. We’re still here.
And I’m pretty certain, we’ll go through yet another cycle of this event same time, next year.
If you are someone who follows my blogs, then you also know I try to give you some tips on management of mood, thought, feeling and affect. Because, in reality, the who-what-when-where-how of your humanity and life experience are uniquely yours to manage. I offer tips, not cures, I try to provide evidence-based practices, not magical charms that work without understanding of a reason behind why.
Peace. Be well. Thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
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