a study of the self
notes on solitude
I’ve long felt that October is my favorite month. In the midwest, the leaves would change and the weather would cool, and life would slow in its inimitable way. And I loved the slowdown, the excuse to retreat without explanation beyond the season itself.
This week I’ve been relishing the slowdown again. I’ve spent less time in the gym (with minimal regret), and more time making and savoring classic Egyptian dishes from my childhood.
I stepped into a hectic routine at work and a soothing one at home, mostly alone. Often, I find time to spend with others most days of the week, but lately I’ve been turning inward.
The solitude this week brought me back to the time I spent in medical school, where I was mostly alone outside of school, writing my poetry chapbook. I spent so much of this solitude studying medicine, but also studying myself in a moment where I wasn’t entirely sure who she was.
The beat of this week reminded me, too, of pandemic era quarantine, work followed by solitude far different and fearful. There are times when I miss it, oddly. I suspect this is related to the reason I love the transition to winter months, the shift from buoyant energy to rest and decay, and with it, an innate synchrony with the cycle of living.
When I lived in Chicago, I learned about hygge, the Danish quality of being cozy and content. I relished it.
Michelle Obama once described winter in Chicago as, “a hundred straight days beneath an iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped. There’s the sound of that scraping in the early mornings—the hack hack hack of it—as people clear their cars to go to work. Your neighbors, unrecognizable in the thick layers they wear against the cold, keep their faces down to avoid the wind. City snowplows thunder through the streets as the white snow gets piled up and sooty, until nothing is pristine.”
And with it comes a certain communal appreciation for the cozier things in life. It never gets as cold in D.C., but the sentiment hasn’t left me.
I’m lighting candles, reading this book, and drinking tea in the evening. I ordered this sweater, which I wore in assorted colors through high school as part of a dreaded uniform. I miss the sweater; I miss the familiarity. Part of me also misses this girl who looked so far forward into the future with a gritty certainty about who she’d be. I ask myself often if I’ve lived up to this vision. I’d like to think yes.
Every now and then I admire her hunger, a trait that still lurks beneath the surface, but wanes with each passing year. What is it about time that makes us lose motivation? Or maybe the question is rather, what is it about time that makes us content?
In a way, if you follow the rhythms of life, you find your own—thoughts and body adapting to one another for brief moments, when ordinarily they can feel so desperately out of sync.
Maybe in winter our souls settle for a moment in their temporary homes, comfortable as a worn sweater with familiar loose threads and patches. And when summer returns, the earth tilts in its familiar orbit and we grow a little listless, knowing what awaits is independent of the body, vast and important in its own right.
For the moment, I’ll take the chance to live in the present and stop living in the future. For this moment, I will end my own annihilation.
Annihilation—destruction, but also the conversion of matter into energy—subtly conducted every day in an effort to be better, someone different than myself in this particular moment, someone else.
—M
P.S. If you want a way to bask in the slowdown, I’ll leave you with a podcast of the same name, a poetry salon, a small retreat, an end to annihilation.