Enjoying winter, walking in winter
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This Is The Year I Do Winter Differently

A staunch Summer Person resolves to stave off SAD by walking daily

“Everything I do is, ‘Will this get me undepressed?’” said the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. His words came to me via Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, but they may as well have been delivered via parted clouds and celestial light shaft, so uncannily did they summarize my chief objective come winter in Toronto.

I am an inveterate Summer Person. More than 40 barely endured winters have led me to conclude that this seasonal incompetence is among my immutable, identifying traits—like my brown eyes or my failure to understand the appeal of sci-fi. Once I’ve cuddled up in the depths of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), nothing short of the first burst of spring works to get me undepressed. As Dr. Seuss (who was probably not referring to mood disorders) wrote in Oh, the Places You’ll Go: “When you’re in a slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.” 

A few months ago, before the first frost, which is to say when I still had hope, I resolved that this would be the year I wouldn’t let winter take me down. I was on vacation, high on vitamin D and leisure, when I saw a declaration by Brooklyn-based blogger Joanna Goddard on her popular site Cup of Jo: “For decades, I got the winter blues, but now I actually look forward to this time.” She explains that during quarantine, she and a few friends committed to walking 10,000 steps per day. “It legit changed my life.” I instantly pledged that I too would walk my way through winter.

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Joanna Goddard (@cupofjo)

In this fantasy, the sort I could only have concocted while lying on a Caribbean beach, Winter Me was a montage of wind-blushed cheeks, clear blue skies and trees freshly dolloped with snow; somehow I’d also been cast in a 1940s MGM Christmas musical and endowed with Andie MacDowell’s 20-year-old berries-and-cream complexion from that snowy kissing scene in St. Elmo’s Fire.

Reality, of course, has a lot to answer for. On my first few winter walks, I am not undepressed by the city streets slovenly with exhaust-hued piles of slush, the landscape’s flatness interrupted only by a pin-sharp curtain of diagonal freezing rain. 

After a week, I decide to skip a day, to give myself a pass on account of extreme wretchedness, which I realize undermines the point of the experiment. The goal is to participate in the inclemency, not to complain about it. “This weather makes me feel like I’m driving with the emergency brake on,” my husband remarks, enabling me to stay in park. 

In hopes of finding inspiration, I spend my day off reading Katherine May’s beautiful memoir Wintering. It’s an ode to the quiet slowness of the season but also to the symbolic winters that inevitably map a lifetime, those hard, fallow periods that require rest and gentleness, leaving change and renewal in their wake. I love reading about May crossing the Arctic Circle in juddering January cold from my bed. While May freezes in Iceland, I sip piping tea next to two sleeping cats. It reminds me of how I often find myself guilt-reading about the morning routines of productive people whilst lying down (and not on a yoga mat). 

On the days when I do manage to summon the escape velocity needed to leave the powerful gravitational pull of my house, I try to summon May’s appreciation for the quiet beauty of winter. I try to be lulled by its soft (read: grey) palette, to view heavy clouds as quilts of double-faced cashmere, to see charm in cars freckled with slush, Reader: I fail. I do spot a sensational cardinal and his red-beaked wife on a white-skied day and feel a flash of delight, but I can’t help but think their plumage would look even more striking against skies of persistent blue. The sun makes a thrilling appearance for about six minutes, only to retreat once again behind the cloud cover, no doubt on medical leave until spring.

Still, I know there are irrefutable benefits of movement. SAD is recognized as a subset of major depressive disorder, and physical activity is a first-line defense against it. “Exercise influences the same chemicals as antidepressants do,” writes psychiatrist and author Dr. John Ratey in his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. He describes depression as a sort of brain lock, a glaciation of our inner world. “It’s a form of hibernation: when the emotional landscape turns wintry, our neurobiology tells us to stay inside.” 

There’s something medicinal about the act of just moving forward, as opposed to in circles in your head.

Exercise, Ratey argues, is an effective way to unlock the brain and body—like jump cables to a car with expired batteries. “What makes aerobic exercise so powerful is that it’s our evolutionary method of generating that spark. It lights a fire on every level of your brain.” It’s not just the movement itself that helps; it’s the mere fact of having done it. “When you see yourself moving, that alone is an achievement—proof that you can help yourself.” And, on a basic level, walking disrupts the inertia and stasis that defines any depression. There’s something medicinal about the act of just moving forward, as opposed to in circles in your head.

So I keep going. But as I trot through the city on yet another grey January day, I realize that all of my steps have unlocked something else inside me. The thing with these walks is that, like a neurotic thought loop, they deliver me right back to my doorstep in Toronto, where I started, and not to, say, a lounger in Maui. I decide that one winter soon, I really will get up and move—to somewhere sunnier. Maybe it’s the endorphins kicking in, but just this prospect makes me feel undepressed. Towards this new goal, I tell myself: run, don’t walk. 

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