Rethinking the “Doldrums”: A Winter’s Tale

I’m from Texas. A year and a half ago, I moved to Illinois for graduate school. And something radical happened. I experienced my first winter. My first coat (no joke) and boots and scarves. My first time in the teens and negatives. My first black ice. Some of the only snow I’ve ever seen. And my first encounter with seasonal depression—or what I euphemistically called “the doldrums”—as I was locked indoors for the first time in my life. I felt haggard, emptied, and tossed inside as the outdoor world went dark, bitter, and barren.

Now the weather may seem a mundane topic for an essay, but I hope you’ll bear with me. Because I’ve learned something profound about life from living in the Midwest, from living in the cold. And it’s something I don’t think I could have learned in Texas where we joke about our seasons being “hot, hot, and hotter.”

A couple of months ago, I woke up to a total shift in my city’s aura. It was officially fall. The air was crisper, cooler. Accompanied by an urgency twisted in bated breath as everything living began to die. The instant when nature begins falling, people in the Midwest spend every possible second outside, as if holding the hand of a dying lover, in order to capture every last memory before the moment is gone and the golden hue of autumn fades to a barren gray. Then, at winter’s onset, the harsh and bitter of winter physically pushes people indoors as if nature itself is saying, “You are not allowed to join me in death. You must mourn. And wait.” And so grieving begins, the outdoors a grave, a snow-burial as everything still breathing retreats into hibernation, isolation, and sleep. The mourning is a long process, a long season, with pain and wailing and even keening and then acceptance and anticipation for what comes next. The heartbeat slows, quiets, and then quickens.

Fall in the Midwest carries a sadness in death, a mourning, that we don’t understand in Texas. We don’t mourn in Texas because we don’t experience loss. Not everything dies…but merely yellows, or browns, or continues to retain its verdant warmth. We are a state of evergreens. Evergreens. And because of that comforting word “ever” with “green,” that combination that suggests stability, changeless-ness, and ongoing life, because of that constancy in weather, that lack of extremity, we aren’t as familiar with loss and death in nature. In fact, the warmth and sun constantly beckon us, entice us beyond our doors saying, “I’m inviting you outside. Come. Join me. Let’s play.”

This yearly process of nature’s death is foreign to someone like me from the subtropics. In fact, I’ll go so far as to admit that I’ve always felt a sincere fear of what is cold. Even the word “cold” is frightening. Just look at how we use it in the English language beyond natural phenomena—cold as a corpse, out cold, cold in the grave, cold-hearted, cold-blooded, cold fish, to have cold feet, to give the cold shoulder, to leave someone out in the cold…and even to describe bodily illness in catching a cold. To describe someone as cold is an insult. In English, when we describe cold people, we mean that, like the weather, they lack the warmth of the sun in their lives that heats, brightens, and allows the spreading of joy and pleasure to others. Cold people are passionless. In all of these examples, cold is negatively charged, aloof, and cruel. Its connotation carries implicit undertones of lack, emptiness, or deadness, as well as a standoffish-ness, an unpredictability, and, perhaps, a kind of repression as well. Cold is warmth absent.

Because of my inexperience in dealing with the cold, I spent the first 23 years of my life unfamiliar with the loss and suffering that comes from enduring winter. Last winter I began to wonder if I could rethink the cold, its benefits, in order to work my way out of the doldrums and to reconsider the people who decide to live their lives in the cold—beyond my initial gut reaction of wondering, “Why do they choose this harsh weather? Why don’t they move South?” Because, the truth is, these people are strong, and in knowing them, I’ve come to understand their knowledge of coldness as a good thing. The truth is, I think people from this place, people from my new home in the Midwest and people from cold climates, understand loss and the fear of losing what is dear more intimately, more fully, than we do in the south since each passing season marks itself in nature and sensation so starkly. Since the fall of nature conditions people for parallel confrontations with falls in life. And this understanding is a meaningful preparation for something bigger amidst this process of the natural world dying.

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel about life in the Soviet Gulags, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the main character, Ivan, serves a ten-year prison sentence in a labor camp in Siberia. The prisoners of this camp endure unimaginable weather conditions of 17 degrees or more below zero, as well as abuse by camp officers, malnutrition, sickness, harsh labor, and more. In one of the most profound moments of his story, Ivan asks himself, “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?”

I bring up this amazing novel not only because it speaks of the cold, but because Ivan speaks of the experience of the cold and its connection to empathy. Knowing loss intimately allows for truer empathy. People in the Midwest and those from cold climates, I believe, have a capacity for deep empathy with those who have lost because they’re more familiar with loss and the absence of all that is warm—plus, they have many strategies for keeping warm. They also understand communal mourning because everyone is called into a season of loss at the same time. Not that those from warm climates (like myself) cannot empathize—they can—but the confrontation with loss, I believe, is more familiar as death is experienced every year like an alarm clock chiming in the annual “death hour.”

However, this ability to empathize is something all believers in Christ, no matter their origin, are called to connect with through Christ’s death and resurrection. Ivan’s words immediately remind me of Philippians 3 when Paul talks about loss and suffering and how these experiences allow us to identify with and share in Christ’s suffering. And this is a good thing even though it means pain. We will all experience loss in our lives, whether confronted annually in nature or not. We will all face death in different ways. And this certain knowledge should push us toward those in need, toward those experiencing loss, in order to bring them comfort and hope.

Hope is the good news that sharing with Christ’s suffering promises. Sharing in Christ’s suffering—as well as with the suffering of those around us, death in life and in nature—allows us to share in Christ’s resurrection as well. Fellowship in loss and in life. This is the thrilling part. Paul writes in verses 7-11:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

This isn’t a death-wish. It is Paul’s declaration that he wants to live an empathetic life. That empathy should be primary in a life of faith. Empathy enacted is fellowship realized—it is joint ownership of pain and joy. And when Paul uses the word “faith” here, I think we can also substitute the word “hope.” Without knowledge of loss, I believe, there is no hope. What I’ve learned about winter in the Midwest is that, while it is the season of loss and grief and communal mourning, it’s also the season of hope and anticipation. Our own loss, allows hope to persist and to hopefully (pun intended) and faithfully reign amidst the cold. And as Paul writes in Romans, hope will not disappoint.

Spring, in Illinois, is the season of resurrection, just as fall is a certain death. In spring, all in nature is reborn, and we who lived through this season of death, this absence of warmth, also experience rebirth as, once more, the living of nature invites us to enter its presence once more. Spring is the most glorious season after the pain of winter. Spring is hope realized, hope attained, hope fulfilled. Like the sweetest of promises. Like a miracle.

My own prayer is that we, whether familiar with the cold or not, will have the ability to empathize warmly with people so we may fellowship with them in both pain and joy, times of death and rebirth. My prayer is that as seasons of life continue shifting, continue dying and being reborn, that we won’t allow the doldrums of loss to bury us in the snow, that we’ll stand firm, encouraged, hopeful, and that we will cherish even the time of cold and barren and bitter, as an opportunity to identify more fully with both Christ’s suffering and his glorious resurrection.