Solstice Musings

The other day, I talked to a dear friend who was moving through a difficult time. As he shared feelings of sadness and fear arising based on the challenging circumstances he was navigating, he paused and pivoted, "I mean, I have so much I should be grateful for."

I've found that counting your blessings or recognizing all you're grateful for can often serve as a means to bypass the feelings of sadness, loss, or pain. In this society, there are pressures to feel joyful, express happiness, and focus on the good. And sometimes that can be really hard to do.

Each winter for the last several years, I have read the book "Wintering" by Katherine May. This book was gifted to me by another dear friend when I was navigating the initial grief of the passing of my dad a few years back. And I've found that something else surfaces each time I revisit her prose.

In the book's final chapter, May writes of this pressure to feel and express happiness, and she makes a case for unhappiness.

I'm beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us something is going wrong. If we don't allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.

When we jump immediately to a gratitude practice to push away that which is difficult, we can lose this opportunity for growth. And similar to May, I'm not advocating for the feelings of pain or sadness to take residence in our beings, but instead, as my mom put it, might we bear witness to the difficult things we're moving through?

And all of this got me thinking about bulbs. Not the Christmas bulbs draped around trees, the fronts of buildings, and fire escapes, but the flowering kind. Hyacinth, Tulips, Iris, and Daffodils.

Weeks, if not months ago, many bulbs were nestled into the soil after the earth had cooled from the heat of summer but before the chill of the first frost. These bulbs now lie dormant in their dark, wintry environments. In order to flower in the spring, these bulbs need exposure to the cold. This exposure awakens a process of growth.

In the northern hemisphere, today is the solstice, the shortest day of the year. And starting tomorrow, there will be a few more seconds of sunlight, which may not feel like much. But over time, those seconds will compound; they will slowly warm the earth and, in turn, stir these bulbs deep underground, gently coaxing them awake. Eventually, these bulbs will sprout, push through the soil, and, in the spring, move from bud to blossom.

And I think it can be the same for us; as we move through periods of darkness or challenge, might we feel the gentle warmth of gratitude, not as a means to wash away the difficulty, but to gently support us as we move through a stage of growth. And with time, we too might find our moment in which we break through and blossom.