#59: seasons of delivery vs. data collection
on missing winter's cues, creating our own seasons and living as a "day artist"
In this letter: A gentle little chart to locate yourself in the season.
References Mentioned:
I Didn’t Do the Thing Today by Madeleine Dore (Book)
How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same? (Jezebel)
A nutritional neuroscientist offers tips on how to avoid the winter blues (The Conversation)
Ukraine fears western support will fade as media loses interest in the war (The Guardian)
The non-linear workdays changing the shape of productivity (BBC)
Why Retailers Are Trying Extra Hard to Woo Holiday Shoppers (NYT)
Wintering by Katherine May (Book)
Sinking into the season (Kristen LaValley)
The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine translated by Maoshing Ni (Book)
How to design a life (me)
Calendars are for managing your time. But planners are for dreaming without limits. (NPR)
On Being’s Foundations (Podcast)
Good morning,
I took a season’s break after moving to California and so much has been percolating over the last few months. My biggest “goal” this year is to shift from the eternal balancing act of “I work+rest+play” to the unifying identity of artist in which “My daily life is art.” In other words, to become a day artist.
This is a concept from Madeleine Dore’s book, I Didn’t Do the Thing Today, where she writes:
We seem to forget that we can be creative with at least part of our schedules, our careers, our conversations, our definitions of balance, ambition, and enjoyment. We don’t have to make grand creative gestures to find poetry in our daily lives—we can simply try something new or see something anew. It can be appreciating something in the day that already exists or reshaping it to suit us.
To borrow a quote attributed to actress Helena Bonham Carter, everything in life is art: “What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
Each of us creates our day through how we interact with the world, with ourselves, with other people. If we see creativity as a way of being rather than of doing, we can attempt to live each day as if our life itself is a work of art—we can be what I like to call “day artists.” To me, being a day artist affirms that creativity isn’t just something we do—it’s how we live our lives.
For those who have been reading for a while, you know that my biggest passions are thinking carefully about the ways we approach our relationships with media consumption, with care work and with time itself.
And so, after a few months of assessing my own relationships, here’s my new year’s summary, which all began with adjusting to a new definition of “winter.”
The weather in San Francisco is famously temperate year-round. As someone who has spent most of her life in New York, it took this move to realize how dependent I had become on nature marking time for me. An early sunset would tell me it was time to begin soup season. An icy gust of wind whispered that it was time to invite people in instead of going out. The appearance of hot cider at the farmer’s market hinted at a city ready for the holidays. Soon enough, as if in a dance of call and response, a city covered in twinkling lights beckoned at the sky for snow.
By contrast, the city here is grey and rainy (uncharacteristically at the moment; but still her usual temperature) and I’ve been missing my usual winter cues. In December, holiday lights were limited to quiet windows and tourist destinations. The sun did begin to set early, but everyone was out running in their fleece pullovers nonetheless.
No icy winds preclude us from keeping the windows and doors open during the day. And the cold isn’t quite enough to toast ourselves in flannel in front of the fireplace for longer than a few hours, before it’s time to sit outside in the morning fog again.
All this sent me down a path of searching for new seasonal cues; ones that could be more internally driven than externally. If you, like me, need time to be broken into pieces in order to maintain the cadence of ebbs and flows in your life, read on for where I landed.
✨ Cluster: On the Importance of Seasonality
Sameness is one of my least favorite states of being—months without change, structure or intention feel like long stretches of highway and I struggle to stay awake in my daily life.
Perhaps there have been times you can relate to this reader who wrote to Jezebel for advice in May 2020, at the peak of our holding patterns:
My life is beige. Every day is the same. I go to a job that is mainly boring, but sometimes okay. I live in a shitty apartment, but hope that if I stick with my boring job that I will get a raise and move into a slightly less shitty apartment. I have a small but nice group of friends and several hobbies, but feel like I rarely have fun or am excited.
About five years ago, I made this big plan to improve my life. I got a post-grad degree and changed careers. Now all I have is a pile of student loans and an equally dull career but with longer hours.
My problem is that I can’t figure out what I actually want in life, but I do know that it can’t continue like this. I’m 34 years old, and the thought of living in my boring, samey life for another five years, let alone 40 years, fills me with despair.
Is there any sage wisdom you can give me on how you identified what makes you tick in life?
Brandy Jensen replied by acknowledging the depressive nature of sameness:
Everyone is living like a depressive right now. The monotony, isolation, the odd sleeping habits, the feeling that dishes are asexually reproducing in your sink. I used to understand all of these things as outward symptoms of my inner life, but I’ve come to realize that they can be causes and not effects. Am I truly depressed or just acting like it? Is there a difference? Perhaps not.
And if the structure of a day or week, sufficiently repeated without difference, can create the sense that I must be depressed, what about the structure of the world? That these are sad times and it feels bad to live in them is hardly insightful, but lately I’ve been wondering if it’s not so much the sadness but the sameness.
I started collecting resources on seasonality around this time, because as someone who pursued a career in which I have almost complete control over my time, days have a tendency to puddle if I’m not careful.
I read about seasonality in markets, in nature, in our bodies, in our calendars and in our social lives. And it dawned on me that the skill of aligning ourselves through seasons, both in nature and those of our own making, can not only free us from sameness, but also generate unparalleled creative energy.
Without proactively entering into seasons, we live at the mercy of the weather, the news cycle, our work schedules and the market, all of which are in constant competition and evolution with nobody’s best interest in mind.
By contrast, choosing to lean into a season, as with winter, is a remarkable way to gain agency. It’s no wonder that Katherine May’s 2020 book Wintering continues to be a source of solace for so many.
I first learned about the idea of “wintering” from writer Kristen Lavalley, who runs a wintering community through her newsletter. In this past season’s kickoff she wrote:
Humans are cyclical, we’re creatures of rhythm and we thrive on the patterns of our creation. Our circadian rhythms tell us when it’s time to wake up, time to rest, time to sleep. Women can track their cycles and shape our lives around the times our hormone changes will help us be more productive, or when they tell us that we need more rest. It’s kind of fascinating.
Winter isn’t a season we need to power through. I live in a state where winter can last six months of the year. I absolutely do not have that much fight in me. None of us do. So, we give in. We sink into the weather and all the good and bad that it brings and in the sinking in, we are doing ourselves a great kindness.
Your brain will thank you for this. I think you’ll look back on this winter, years from now, and say “This is when it all changed for me.”
Here in the Wintering community, we like to think of wintering as a lifestyle. “Winter” is something that happens to you. “Wintering”is something that you choose. You’re not a victim to the weather, you’re an active participant in a seasonal change. Instead of “Ugh, it’s winter”, we say, “It’s time to winter.”
This definition inspired me so much the first time I encountered it, that I found myself disappointed I wouldn’t get to experience such complete rest in my new climate, unless I found a way to create it for myself.
The first place I started was to abstract from our relationship with nature’s seasons a set of moods that could be applied to any kind of season. For example, in The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine, known as the highest authority on traditional Chinese medicine (authorship attributed to Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, who reigned during the third millennium BCE), the interconnected whole of life and health is directly related to living in rhythm with the seasons, for example:
So the full cycle can be seen. Spring is the beginning of things, when the energy should be kept open and fluid; summer opens up further into an exchange or communication between internal and external energies; in the fall it is important to conserve; finally, the winter is dominated by the storage of energy.
The source of illness is attributed to disrespecting the change of yin and yang through the seasons:
By respecting this natural law it is possible to be free from illness. The sages have followed this, and the foolish people have not.
In the old days the sages treated disease by preventing illness before it began, just as a good government or emperor was able to take the necessary steps to avert war. Treating an illness after it has begun is like suppressing revolt after it has broken out. If someone digs a well when thirsty, or forges weapons after becoming engaged in battle, one cannot help but ask: Are not these actions too late?
This idea of preventive action stood out to me, as I tend to be a bit delayed in my reactions and adoptions; if a big life change happens, I’ll power through efficiently and productively, only to feel the changes weeks or months later, wondering where the blues (or sparkles!) are coming from.
In order to broaden my internal prism and hold greater space for real-time reactions, I found myself intuitively mothering myself through big life changes by whispering “this is a season of data collection, not production” each time I felt I didn’t have answer I needed in order to take the “next step forward.”
I think this way of thinking can apply to anyone—a caregiver navigating how to support a new little one or an aging elder, a builder shepherding a company or community through an unpredictable situation, a changemaker who is struggling to balance productive active and collective rest. Or just plain old me (or you!), if you’re aspiring to view your whole life as art.
And so I made myself a gentle little chart to locate myself in a season, whenever I might need it. We so often use these kinds of processes in work, but rarely in our own lives.
⭐️ Data Collection: Observing and documenting little moments. What feels good? What doesn’t? What questions emerge?
This is the season I experienced from September-December, after moving. Rather than trying to complete anything meaningful (writing, work deliverables, the endless to do list), I took scrupulous notes on my days—the new time zone differences, where and how we feed ourselves, all my new communities, new care teams and daily infrastructure (doctors, dentists, modes of transportation). Every time I felt like I should be able to do more, I relaxed myself to the role of note-taker reminding myself, “This is a season of data collection, not delivery.”
You might decide to enter into a data collection season for any reason at all, be it a move, a new important person in your life, malaise, a plateau, a bright idea or searching for a next step.
In the spirit of Rilke, whose work I was reminded of in a recent conversation:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
⭐️ Discovery: Looking for patterns in the data. Is there a story emerging? What should be prioritized and why?
As of January 1, I felt pretty full of data. I intuitively know I am ready to synthesize because the sparks of inspiration have already begun to spontaneously emerge, like “Aha! I need to write a chapter on this question that keeps tugging at me” and, “Oh, I really don’t like to do admin work in the morning, why try?”
You might choose to switch to discovery when you have enough data, or when you find yourself itching to put something new together because you’ve had enough respite from the production cycle.
⭐️ Building: Putting a foundation down. What habits and practices am I excited to nurture? What time can I protect? What resources could be increased?
I last experienced a period of building last Spring, when I made major commitments to myself to write consistently, increase my time spent on care, and implement new insights at work.
You might start to build when you have identified 1-3 practices you’re really excited about, for yourself or for others. Maybe you’re a creator who is knee-deep in a project and ready to protect some time to churn it out. Maybe you’ve just started therapy and need to dig pretty deep to address what’s coming up, which requires patience and time. Maybe you’re a caregiver with a human or animal little one (I’m currently raising a puppy who needs a solid chunk of my day for cuddles and training). Or maybe you’re leading a team into a new project that will require a concentrated burst of meetings and workshops.
⭐️ Delivering: Doubling down on production. What can I go all out on? Is there anything to streamline to remove bottlenecks?
This was last summer for me, where all engines were running and I needed to level up fast; a whirlwind of conferences, deliverables, appointments and quality time scheduled with loved ones before the big good-bye. Perhaps in the new year, this will look like book delivery season.
These are any times you have to produce an inordinate amount of work but have hopefully built the foundation in seasons past to know how to do it while protecting your health and values.
⭐️ Breaking: Trying to break everything to see what's worth keeping. Do I miss it? Was it strong enough?
Sometimes I get so attached to my way of doing things, I forget to break them. If life doesn’t hand you a whammy every now and then, I suggest intentionally questioning your “normal” for even a brief season. What do you miss? What lasted? What could have used a stronger foundation? It might open the way for a new season of data collection.
I’m a planner-as-journal person and partial to designing my own format, but there are so many out there that can help create the time and space for day-artistry.
Related reading: Calendars are for managing your time. But planners are for dreaming without limits.
In a recent discussion with new friends about the On Being Foundations podcast, (where I was reminded of the above Rilke quote), I found myself gravitating toward these words by Krista Tippett again and again, which I’ll leave with you.
For anyone in a season of data collection:
Even with the magnitude of what is before us, we are equipped in a way previous generations of humans have not been, with knowledge that can be a form of agency: to become more conscious, to become more aware, to take ourselves more seriously, to act like the ecosystem the world needs us to be — sharing what we are seeing, finding ways to share what we are learning, joining our vulnerabilities, and joining our flourishing.
Calling out this reality, naming that there is a generative story of our time, is in fact a way to begin. And I also want to offer a simple practice, which is to set out to become, in the first instance, just alert and somewhat reverent of what is good and lifegiving in the ordinary encounters of your days: what you read, what you focus on, what you look for and notice in people close to you, and also what you notice in strangers. And let that shape the larger picture of the world that you’re working with.
Time Spent is an entirely free resource on media/culture and a public part of my writing practice. Spreading the word is immensely helpful as I test out some of this thinking. If you enjoy it, please consider sending to a friend :)
Happy Monday!
Jihii