Restorative Matters
January edition
The Season of Thresholds
January 1st.
The new year.
Our own personal fresh start.
A moment to begin again with renewed hope and better habits.
A spark of excitement, just like the brand-new books and stationery gave us in the autumn term at school.
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Yet most of us know that this is an unbalanced way to live.
We even make cultural jokes about
New Year’s resolutions that rarely survive till spring, gym memberships taken out in optimism and then abandoned weeks later.
Deep down we don’t really believe these resolutions will last, do we?
Even so, many of us still feel this annual pull towards “new year, new me”.
The thing is though, when we set these New Year’s resolutions in midwinter, we’re essentially asking the space of the dormant season to behave like a lavish, sparkly destination.
And it simply isn’t that.
It is the calm, inward mid-winter Yin to the summer Yang.
Whether we agree with it or not though, there is something in the air at the turn of the calendar year.
There is this subtle pressure in January to reset, to improve, to emerge from December somehow newly formed and totally forward facing.
Even when we resist it intellectually, as I do, the idea of a “clean slate” still seeps in like a fresh cold draft seeping through the cracks.
This air of change and premature renewal shapes expectations that perhaps we didn’t consciously choose, but still find ourselves hopeful of.
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Each year the season of winter asks for a pause.
Which, for the most part, we refuse, choosing instead to blame the season for our lack of motivation, and deeper need for sleep.
Luckily for our ancestors, January 1st was not always treated as a beginning.
Humans have walked the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, yet the modern calendar is only a few centuries old.
Early Roman calendars began in March, aligned far more sensibly with spring and the return of growth.
It wasn’t until Julius Caesar’s reform in 45 BC that January 1st was fixed as the civil new year, done for administrative and military convenience, not seasonal or somatic wisdom.
In fact, in England, January 1st wasn’t the legal new year until 1752, a mere 274 years ago. In historical terms, this is practically yesterday.
In other words, the idea of January as a clean starting point isn’t ancient wisdom, it’s a cultural invention.
One that lands awkwardly in the darkest, coldest part of the year.
Winter itself is a liminal season.
The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold.
A liminal space is not an ending and not yet a beginning.
It is the pause, a doorway of sorts, the moment of stillness before the next movement.
Traditionally, liminal times are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity, dusk and dawn, rites of passage, periods of recovery.
Times when the old has loosened its grip but the new has not yet arrived.
And if we stay with these moments, rather than rushing through them, anticipation often begins to rise.
A kind of pregnant pause.
Nothing is growing yet above the soil, but something beneath the ground feels energetically palpable.
Liminal spaces can feel unsettling if we are in the wrong mindset, but in truth they are alive with possibility, precisely because the future has not yet announced itself.
January sits directly in this territory.
It comes after the peak of Christmas, a season that, whether you love it, tolerate it, or find it overwhelming, carries a huge cultural charge.
We move toward a crescendo of activity, spending, socialising, and meaning-making right in the heart of winter… and then overnight it collapses.
What remains is the true depth of the season.
Long weeks still ahead.
Fewer external markers. Less money, less energy, and a quiet emotional aftershock from whatever Christmas stirred up, joy, grief, loneliness, comparison, exhaustion.
During this time of year, words like seasonal effective disorder are thrown around casually, despite S.A.D. being a medical diagnosis under the umbrella of clinical depression, as recorded in the DSM-5.
In fact, the percentage of adults diagnosed in the UK is estimated to be around 0.5% to 2.5% of the population, compared with roughly 20% of people who believe they experience it - despite not actually suffering from clinical depression.
So is this more to do with mindset?
Kari Leibowitz’s research for her brilliant book How to Winter offers an important counterbalance here.
She found that in communities living through extreme winter darkness, mindset was one of the strongest predictors of winter well-being.
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Mindset dosnt magically erases difficulty, but the way people interpret seasonal conditions directly shapes their physiological and emotional response to them.
In her studies of Norwegian and Arctic populations, those who saw winter as a season with its own pleasures, rhythms, and opportunities reported far lower levels of seasonal depression, even with minimal daylight.
This doesn’t dismiss clinical seasonal effective disorder, which is a very real medical condition for a smaller percentage of people, but it does illuminate how cultural narratives influence the much larger group who experience “winter blues”.
Leibowitz argues that re-framing winter as a meaningful season rather than a problem to endure can change how our bodies metabolise the months, shifting us out of dread and into engagement.
Without the right mindset, these weeks can feel bare and exposed.
We rise to a false peak in December for the celebration of Christmas, and are then expected to renew ourselves before we have had any real chance to rest.
This is where winter asks something radical of us.
To soften into stillness.
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In Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, another favourite winter read of mine, Katherine May writes about periods where energy dips and clarity dissolves.
Times when the only honest response is patience.
She reminds us that winter, literal and metaphorical, is a necessary recalibration.
Winter was never here to motivate us, rather to metabolise what has already happened.
As a trained sound therapist, I am taught to allow a short silence at the end of a gong journey.
This pause is known as the Sanskrit word shunyata, meaning the void.
An essential integration.
Without this silence, something vital is lost.
Winter is rather like life’s 'shunyata'
A necessary quiet after intensity.
A space where experience lands.
Where the body catches up with the story.
Winter months ask for listening. For allowing things to remain unresolved long enough to be honest.
For standing at the threshold without rushing through it simply because the calendar says we should.
This is why January feels unsettling for so many of us in the UK, and why people often explain that unsettled feeling by simply claiming that “winter is depressing.”
January is a threshold we must stand in, whether we like it or not.
The invitation is not to reject the modern Roman calendar entirely.
Unfortunately, along with other strange inventions such as the clock changes, I believe it is here to stay.
But we don’t have to surrender to it either.
Rather, it is to meet this moment with more care.
To recognise that this liminal space, this threshold of a season, has its own intelligence, slow, regulating, but only when we allow it, only when we purposefully lean into it.
We do not need to know the shape of the year ahead on one particular chosen day in midwinter.
Instead we can soften the cultural narrative that winter is bleak, and allow something else to become visible.
We can start to see that winter is not a problem to endure, nor a bridge to something better.
It is a season of suspension.
There is a particular kind of healing available only in stillness.
In allowing things to remain unfixed and unforced.
In a culture that worships momentum, choosing not to move can feel uncomfortable, even rebellious.
But winter has always been the season that teaches us rest is not passive, as much as inaction is not absence.
Winter is about inhabiting what is.
A season of contraction.
Of containment.
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There is a particular voice in modern literature that has always understood this way of being in the world.
Mary Oliver
As an American poet, Oliver's whose work centered almost entirely on attention, on the act of noticing what is alive, and most extraordinary in the natural world.
She wrote in plain, accessible language, but with immense depth, returning again and again to themes of presence and belonging, and looked inside the intelligence of the more-than-human world.
Oliver did not write about nature as something decorative or distant.
She wrote from within it, walking the same paths daily, observing birds, weather, grasses, and seasons with patience and devotion.
Her poems rarely rush toward conclusions.
Instead, they linger, allowing meaning to emerge slowly through sustained attention.
In her poem Winter Hours she reflects on the pared-back discipline of winter, the way the season strips life back to essentials, asking less of us outwardly while offering something inwardly rich in return.
Winter, in Oliver’s work, is not absence or deprivation, but a time when the world becomes quieter and therefore easier to hear.
Her writing reminds us that attention itself is a form of relationship.
That staying with what is, without trying to improve or escape it, is not resignation, but a practice of deep listening.
​This tension between staying still and being pulled forward is ancient.
The Greeks understood this deeply.
They knew time was not one thing but many.
And this becomes especially helpful in January.
They named the linear kind of time Chronos, sequential, measurable, scheduled. The ticking clock.
The turning calendar. Deadlines, diaries, and productivity.
Chronos asks:
“What time is it?”
In Chronos time, life can feel like something to keep up with. Even rest becomes something to optimise.
But they also named another form: Kairos, the right moment.
Time that cannot be forced. Time that arrives through readiness.
Kairos asks:
“Is the time right?”
Kairos is felt.
It is seasonal and embodied.
The time of intuition, and natural unfolding.
Winter belongs to Kairos.
When we try to live winter in Chronos, setting goals and expecting momentum, we create internal conflict with the season itself.
No wonder January feels disorienting.
It’s as if the season of winter whispers in Kairos, but the Roman calendar, with January sitting like the king in the castle, is bellowing in Chronos.
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Poet Mary Oliver understood this deeply.
Her poems are invitations to slow down and to notice the world without rushing past our own experience.
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In Winter Hours she writes from within the discipline of winter as revelation.
Her work reminds us that noticing is a relationship, and attention is participation.
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Perhaps what winter offers us is a temporary return to Kairos.
A break from the relentless forward pull of Chronos.
A season where waiting is the point.
And that, perhaps, is the gift of this time of year:
The rare permission , and encouragement, to pause.
To trust that when the time is right, movement will come of its own accord.
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Written in love with wonder,
Olivia,
