Making Winter A Season To Reflect On Your Creative Journey
When I think of winter, I think of the hush that happens when new snow has fallen and wrapped itself over the world. It’s a magical moment, a space of wonder and stillness.
In this quiet season, we can find space to go a little gentler. When I surveyed creatives on how the seasons affected them, winter didn’t surface as a productive season, but one that was strong on something else: reflection.
So let’s take a look at how winter affects us and how we can embrace that in our creative work.
Space for reflection
Winter is the season when nature hibernates and we reflect on the year that ends and the year we begin. Many of us have rituals around the end of the year with journaling questions and exercises to uncover what we have learned from our year, and what we want in the next one. We choose words of the year and new goals and intentions.
In many ways, we step back and zoom out and consider how we’re moving through life. If our direction is the right one. If our path is taking us where we want. It can be scary questions to ask, but powerful ones all the same.
If we embrace the reflectiveness of winter, we can uncover many insights about our creative journeys. What’s working for you and what isn’t. What you enjoy, and what you don’t.
That understanding can be invaluable for you to move forward in your creative life. But we have to pause and go a little slower to make space for that reflection to happen. So what we can learn from winter is that sometimes going slower, means we can then go forward in a much clearer direction.
The new year energy
Many of us get a burst of energy in the beginning of the new year. With new goals and a fresh start, we feel hopeful about the future and empowered to make things happen.
This can be a good opportunity to pursue some things that have felt a little scary. Make decisions you’ve been holding off on making, put yourself out there in a way that feels new.
Perhaps there’s a project you’ve been meaning to get started with or take up again for a long time, but haven’t gotten there. January can be a great time to pick up those thread and set things in motions.
The accountability of a new year can also help you move forward with something where you have felt a little stuck. One way to do this can be to announce that you’re doing something, or to find an accountability partner.
But we shouldn’t put too much pressure on our January selves. If we do, we risk crashing way too quickly instead of setting ourselves up for a good, long year.
Allowing winter to be what it is
Instead of running head first into the new year and expect yourself to have made great things happen before spring, let’s allow winter to be what it is. It’s a dark and quiet season when many of us are a little low on energy.
It’s a season much better suited for rest and reflection than for productivity and hard work. This is what I think we’re missing when we start to feel bad at the end of January when we’re not going as fast as we think we should. The year is long. Allow winter to be the calmer season that it really is. With spring, new energy and inspiration will come.
Apart from leaning into reflection in our creative work, winter can be a good season to plan and prepare ourselves for the year ahead. Do some behind the scenes work or scale things down to our core, essential creative work and really hone that.
Winter can feel like a cold, dark season, but can also be a soft, hopeful one. A season of calm, rest and reflection.
If you’re feeling inspired to create more in tune with the seasons and to reflect this winter, I’ve created a guide called Four Seasons of Creative Work. It guides you through the end of the year reflections and to plan your new year in tune with the seasons. Check it out if that sounds like something you want to do this winter.
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