Trusting the Winter
It's been snowing since morning. The kind that buries — roads gone, fence posts swallowed, the world outside turned to white and hush.
In here, there's warmth. A fire. And in my arms, my son. Three days old.
I'm reading to Ari for the first time. A Dr. Seuss book full of futures — all the places he'll go, the friends waiting to meet him. Horn-tooting apes. A cat in a striped hat. Horton, who believes a person's a person, no matter how small.
He can't understand a word. His eyes drift toward the firelight and close. He doesn't know yet that language exists. That stories exist. That his father is something separate from himself.
I read anyway.
Because this is what you do when someone arrives. You plant seeds in ground that isn't ready. You speak words that can't land yet. You tend what you can't see growing.
Outside, beneath all that snow, something else is happening. Seeds in the frozen ground are being broken open — not destroyed, but prepared. The cold working on their shells, readying what's inside for a spring they can't imagine. Skip the winter, and the seed never opens.
The book ends with a line I'd been carrying for months: I can't wait to meet you.
And sitting with him in the firelight — the blizzard still doing its quiet work outside — I finally understand the months before he came. The uncertainty. The open space I didn't know how to fill.
It wasn't empty. It was preparation.
Not all waiting is the same.
The seeds beneath the snow. The words planted in a child who can't yet hold them. The self being reshaped in the dark.
This is how new things begin. Not by forcing. By tending. By trusting the winter.
We're taught that courage looks like pushing through. Deciding. Acting. Taking the next hill even when you're exhausted.
But what if the bravest thing you can do is not force it?
The turning of the year asks a question most of us aren't ready to answer. The holidays end. The calendar turns. And suddenly there's this pressure — from the culture, from the people around you, from the voice in your own head — to know what's next. To have a word for the year. A resolution. A direction.
Maybe you're there right now. Maybe the truest thing you can say is: I don't know yet — and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The Pressure to Fill the Gap
It sounds simple — giving yourself permission to not know. But it's one of the hardest things a person can do.
The temptation is to close the gap as quickly as possible — to reach for a new plan, a new title, a new answer. But premature closure isn't just impatience. It's a kind of theft. You rob yourself of what the space was preparing to offer. You dig up the roots before they've had time to spread.
I've seen it happen — in clients, in colleagues, in myself. The executive who leaps into a new role before understanding why the last one burned him out. The entrepreneur who launches the next venture before grieving the one that failed. The person who reconstructs a new identity so quickly that it's just the old one wearing different clothes.
They move on. But they don't move through. And whatever was trying to emerge in the gap — whatever new alignment, new self-knowledge was quietly forming underground — gets buried under the urgency to feel whole again.
But I've also seen the opposite.
A client came to me recently — one of several this year with almost identical stories — after years of running at a pace her body could no longer sustain. Successful by every visible measure. But she described something I've heard from so many leaders lately: the inability to switch off. The emails answered before her feet touched the floor. The weekends where she was physically present but internally still braced — always braced — for the next demand.
She knew it wasn't sustainable. Her body was telling her. The people closest to her were telling her. But when she imagined stepping back, even temporarily, she couldn't see what would take its place. And that scared her more than the exhaustion.
Then something shifted.
She decided January would be the month she stopped filling every gap. Not to fix anything. Not to optimize her recovery. Just to sit with the uncertainty. Spend unhurried time with the people she loved. Reconnect to longings she'd buried so long ago she'd almost forgotten they were hers.
"I don't have a plan," she told me. "I just know I can't keep pretending this pace is a life."
She's not leaping into a new chapter or announcing a reinvention. She's doing something harder: letting the space stay open, and trusting that clarity will come when she's ready to receive it.
That takes more courage than any pivot I've ever witnessed.
What the Bamboo Knows
There's a species of bamboo — Moso bamboo — that spends its first four or five years doing almost nothing visible. You water it. You tend the soil. And for years, you see no growth. What's happening underground is invisible: a root system spreading, deepening, building infrastructure that will eventually support extraordinary height.
Then, in a single growing season, it shoots up eighty feet.
If you harvested it early — if you dug it up to check, if you decided it was dead and moved on — you'd miss everything. The explosion of growth was only possible because of the years of invisible preparation.
Eighty feet in a single season. But only because someone didn't give up during the years it looked like nothing.
Some things can only arrive on their own schedule. Your job isn't to hurry them — it's to be ready.
The Discipline of Non-Action
The Taoists had a word for this: wu wei — often translated as "non-action," but more accurately understood as not forcing. Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. Over centuries, it reshapes mountains. The paradox is that by not forcing, more gets accomplished than by striving.
This isn't just philosophy. Neuroscience is catching up. When we stop focusing on external tasks, a specific brain network activates — the default mode network. For years, researchers assumed the brain went quiet during rest. It doesn't. The default mode network lights up during mind-wandering, and it's strongly associated with creativity, insight, and what researchers call the "incubation effect" — where solutions emerge only after you stop reaching for them.
The brain is working. Just not in ways the striving mind can perceive.
And here's what the body knows: burnout isn't just exhaustion. It's a nervous system stuck in sympathetic activation — fight-or-flight mode — unable to return to baseline. Studies show that people with chronic stress lose heart rate variability, the body's capacity to respond and recover. Rest alone doesn't fix this. The system needs active restoration — intentional rest that tells the body it's safe.
Waiting is passive. Tending is labor.
The labor of a still mind — like reading to a child who can't yet understand. Like seeds being broken open in the cold. Skip the winter, and the seed never opens.
Three Practices for Trusting the Winter
If you're in your own in-between — waiting for something that hasn't arrived, tending to a becoming you can't yet see — these might help.
The Unhurried Response
When something asks for your reaction — an email, a question, an opportunity — wait. Not strategically. Not avoidantly. Just pause. Let the silence hold the question a little longer.
Notice what arises when you don't fill the space immediately. This isn't about finding better answers. It's about learning what patience has to offer.
The Non-Decision
Identify one decision you're tempted to make — about work, identity, direction. Don't make it. Let it stay open for one more week.
Notice what clarity arrives uninvited. Sometimes the most important information only comes after you stop reaching for it.
The Tending Practice
Ask yourself: What would I tend if I trusted something was coming?
Then do one small thing to ready the space — not the plan, not the strategy, but the ground. Clear your calendar for an afternoon. Walk somewhere without your phone. Pick up the instrument you haven't touched in years. Call the friend who knew you before.
Act as if something is on its way. It usually is.
There's a moment when stillness tips toward motion. When waiting becomes readiness.
The in-between doesn't last forever. It's not supposed to. It's a season — and seasons turn.
If you're still in yours — still tending, still waiting, still trusting the winter — know this: the labor isn't wasted. It's seeds being broken open. It's roots building in the dark. It's the invisible preparation without which no real growth is possible.
And somewhere in you — maybe quietly, maybe at the edges of awareness — something is getting ready.
You'll know when it's time.
What would you do if you trusted you were ready?