Winter or Summer Person?
Created | Updated Apr 11, 2021
A look at a 'big picture' question.
Winter or Summer Person?
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Winter people are late risers. They are buried in their beds as one day they will be buried in their coffins. Teenagers too are late risers, their roots buried in the ground as they seek the transformative to spring into life with a new, changed, adult body – flowering into their summer self after a winter of discontent.
Winter people are the old, dying plants of yesteryear as children are Spring, leaping into simple, joyful action rather than crushed by the complexity of age. They change like tadpoles or butterflies but not so drastically in form. Like in the film An American Werewolf in London, their bodies are wrenched and stretched into new shapes as their internal chemistry and physique alter and their roles in life swap from the cared for to the caring, children to adults.
The old are like zombies in worn out bodies – slow, forgetful, smelly and falling to bits. They say the old are wise because they have survived the impetuosity of youth but this might be down to good luck as opposed to the bad luck of poor choices.
Winter is like an air raid that leads us to shelter from the savagery of bad weather; the icy tongues that whip us with cold winds or grips us with frosty fingers, slowing our tread with slippery ice and deep snow.
This is a time of abandonment and neglect, where we retreat into ourselves in a state of hibernation, when everything slows down to a halt or carrying out the least possible activities, in order to stay alive. It leads to avoidance of action or alternatively rushing things to get them over as quickly as possible. Our senses dull and our attention turns inwards in silent rumination as life lays buried and hidden, in a stilled world, prodded back into action by necessity alone.
Come Spring and like bulbs we burst through the crust of hardship and into the light of a new day, a new hope as every year, clearing away the damage of the past. Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch resurface too as life extroverts our attention once more, in response to the warmth of the giving sun and the lengthening daylight.
Winter people skulk in their memories of yesterday and it's bitter failures. Summer people are only interested in future hopes , future dreams not past despair. They pursue new possibilities because they have a healthy optimism. They don't cling on to a certain past in fear of losing it but risk each day, in the chance of a better but uncertain tomorrow. They have burnt their boats behind them, instead of clinging on to the floating debris of what was, in the hope it will save them.
They won't retreat into ivory towers or hide in castle dungeons, afraid of the changing world around them, holding onto memories of past glories. Instead they are willing to leave behind the relics of the bygone era, throwing off the armour of protection and advancing into the unknown future, naked and afraid but having the courage to trust in a new tomorrow and their imagination that will build it.
