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I Think I Love Winter


I always hated winter. I hated the cold, the loneliness, the expectation of having to have the perfect Christmas with the perfect people, the dark, the rain, the sludge and the snow. I’ve never been diagnosed with SAD but my depression definitely kicked in harder than usual during winter. Winter was a time to go to work, get home and go straight to bed. Ignore all phone calls and messages, sleep as much as possible, eat every now and again, and wait for it to be over. It was a time for auto-pilot hibernation. A way to be alive without living at all. This feeling isn’t exclusive to winter but every single year I would fail to find anything to motivate me from November until as late as April. 

Winter is like a gift for birders. We can see into the trees, like an x-ray, unobstructed by leaves and green. We see bullfinches that usually find safety in denseness as they begrudgingly travel short distances looking for food. We see redwing and fieldfare. We see birds that have travelled thousands of miles for a milder winter whilst we unfailingly complain that it’s too cold.  

In January this year I made a phone call to get some help. The person I spoke to asked me what I did with my time when I wasn’t worrying about the weight of the world and the size of the universe. Within the first couple of minutes of our call he told me that I am ‘one of life’s intelligent over-thinkers’ after, amongst other things, I compared how overwhelmed I often get to any person legitimately trying to picture the size of the universe. It feels like your brain is breaking. I told him about watching birds and I told him why I do it. Why I wrap up in the cold and traipse around with a tripod and a scope and binoculars and a camera even when I wish I could hibernate and only think about opening my eyes in the summer. I told him that I liked not only the unpredictability of nature but also the simplicity. That a bird has one goal each day and that is to not die. It will feed and eat and sleep and clean and provide with the aim of surviving the day. We take our survival for granted, if we’re in good health at the time, and fill our lives and minds with all types of extraneous shite. We have money and politics and politics at work and politics in our relationships and our appearance and our interests and expectations and pressures and language and the internet and deadlines and birthdays and Christmas and the news and always knowing what time it is. 

If these small and vulnerable birds can survive the bleakness of winter then so can I.

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