SALON 09: WINTER will be a digital event taking place on Zoom at 7pm GMT on January 24th. Tickets are discounted for paid subscribers (full info after the paywall below) and available to all subscribers HERE. If you purchase a ticket you’ll receive the full newsletter, including the reading list. I hope to see some of you there!
My mother has a compulsion for checking the weather. Every day (often several times a day) she scans through the cities saved in her Weather app, looking for what? I don’t know. She lives mostly in southern Spain where the weather is predictably sunny, but she’ll often update me on the forecast where I am instead. No need: I’ve inherited the quirk and likely checked the app multiple times that day myself (both in the city where I live and the ones where I once lived). Again, looking for what? I’m not sure.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve probably noticed how often I refer to the weather. Perhaps that’s because I’ve lived in four cities with remarkably different weather patterns (London, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City) and have a lifetime of cross-comparison in my mental rolodex. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a country which is notorious for leading a conversation with weather chat before all else. Perhaps it’s because, like most humans, my daily environment has a profound effect on me! Most likely it’s a combination of all the above. Every year, I’m struck by how I feel like a different person in different seasons: Spring, I’m sprightly and hopeful. Summer, languorous and hedonistic. Autumn, brisk and efficient.
And then there’s winter, where we find ourselves now. Winter has historically been a struggle for me. I have an acute memory of hanging my coat up in the cloakroom at school after drudging there in the February rain, aged 15, and thinking: This isn’t for me. By the time I was 24, I’d moved to Southern California – motivated, in no small part, by that day and countless similar ones that followed. Now, over a decade later, I find myself back in the damp, gloomy climate to which I’ve always felt so ill-adjusted, only with a more philosophical perspective.
Forgive me as I refer to the thesaurus (surely the laziest writing trope in the book). Still, it’s significant that winter not only signifies ‘the coldest period of the year’ but is also synonymous with a ‘lull’ or ‘period of involuntary inactivity or idleness’. In our always-on culture, the latter kind of winter is invariably framed as a negative blip in what should be a consistently high-yielding upward trajectory. The pressure of productivity is crushing and the demand for visibility is relentless. As our growing burnout epidemic illustrates, this is a highly unrealistic expectation for any human being – not least one whose creativity fuels their career.