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Wintering

The Grind Culture Detox

by

1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Archer connects “grind culture”—a values system wherein an individual’s worth is determined by what they produce economically—to the legacies of racial slavery and hyper-capitalism in the United States; she argues for a rejection of this pervasive paradigm and provides a guide to intentional practices of self-care, affirmation, and healing.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this one up on a visit to BookWoman here in Austin. I had originally gone in to pick up Maria Tatar’s new book The Heroine with 1,001 Faces but this one caught my eye, too. It relates to themes in Wintering but draws a direct throughline from our society’s rejection of rest to slavery—an institution that spurred exponential economic growth by leveraging free labor without regard to its brutal and unimaginable human costs: “The foundations of American capitalism was built on a viciously high-stakes environment of productivity or death.” She goes on to connect this as well to our current anti-labor practices and the anti-social welfare rhetoric that precludes progress toward paid maternity care, universal healthcare, and living wages. I was also drawn to her personal story as it mirrored my own in several key ways. Though I’ve managed to take back a measure of my time from the 9-5 grind, I still find myself signing onto projects, filling my days back up with work, and often as mentally and physically depleted as I was before. I suppose this one called out to me so I could read this phrase, toward the book’s end, “…falling back into our old patterns can often provide a beautiful learning opportunity.” As I head into 2023, I found this to be a gentle nudge toward re-centering and listening to mind, body, and spirit.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • If you have experienced any of the following, you’re experiencing the effects of grind culture: a fear of stillness, feeling guilty about resting, viewing exhaustion as productive, sacrificing the needs of your body to produce, overpacking your calendar, never feeling satisfied with what you have, competing with others over who grinds hardest, treating some people as though they are “more important” than others based on their profession.
  • Detoxing from grind culture is not a one-and-done process; the framework of “harm reduction” can be helpful in making steps toward incremental transformation when abstinence is not possible (after all, most of us will continue to need to work).
  • Healthy boundaries are essential to preserving mental, physical, emotional energy and are a key to self-sovereignty and work-life liberation.
  • “Thriving activities” should be customized — there is no one-size-fits all in terms of tending to one’s own well-being. While it is important to engage in movement, nutrition, creativity, mindfulness, learning, rest, and social connection—the methods are entirely up to what brings personal joy.

💯 Strong Lines

  • On grind culture and oppression: “…most of the sacred beings on this beautifully abundant planet are under the spell of materialism, manipulation, control, and coercion. This unfortunate dynamic helps construct things such as racism, gender-based oppression, and ableism. Grind culture provides the fuel to keep these toxic systems running.” (pg. 5)
  • On perfectionism: “Perfectionism is a form of self-harm rooted in the need to appear perfect or attain perfection as a threshold for self-worth in society….[it] dims our resilience, eats up time and energy, blocks our courage, and thwarts the mistakes we have to be able to make in order to learn and grow.” (pg. 10)
  • On motherhood: “Mothers are presented with a painful dichotomy. On the one hand, we’re expected to nurture our newborn from an endless well of attention, care and presence, and on the other, grind culture wants us to prove that our caretaking won’t be a liability.” (pg. 30)
  • On “self-care” (quoting Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha): “It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked form our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?” (pg. 46)
  • On resting as defiance: “It disrupts grind culture’s spinning wheels. There is power in the slowdown. When you slow down, you rest; when you rest, you self-reflect; when you self-reflect, you begin to question, which in turn disrupts the culture of grinding.” (pg. 80)
  • On quiet-as-resistance (quoting Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, with reference to Black social justice movements): “Quiet is often used interchangeably with silence or stillness…Quiet instead is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life, wants, desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears, the inner life is not apolitical or without social value….It has its own sovereignty, it is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent and inevitable.” (pg. 81)

🧠 Brain Tickles

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are so many activities that relate to social-emotional learning and holistic education. The term “self-care” is well-worn and I have seen the same strategies recommended in many corners—deep breathing, a nature walk, drinking enough water, etc (all good, by the way!) But Archer provides a wealth of other strategies in this book, encouraging readers to create their own “toolkits”. Some highlights that would be easy to incorporate/recommend for students:

  • Archer cites the work of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, who outlines a framework for the “rest revolution”—highlighting seven forms of rest: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, sensory, creative. She offers a free “rest quiz” to locate the types of rest you most need to attend to.
  • I think there is a beautiful opportunity to connect some of the activities around “core values” to this book. Archer has a journal reflection that prompts people to think of their core values and then what the “highest expression of honoring these values” would look like in daily life. Then, to outline what one prefers to do to honor it (activities that bring joy connected to the value), what one is willing to allow but does not prefer (norms and tasks that are necessary but not enjoyable), and what one will not allow (i.e. activities, norms and environments that would negate the value entirely). An example of response to this prompt can be found on page 126.
  • The templates for ancestor acknowledgment and land acknowledgment (pp. 34-40) would be powerful connectors for communities of students to better appreciate each others’ experiences and perspectives, and the land they share in common.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

by

1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

This book encourages us all to embrace the “winters” of our lives —times when we are cut off, sidelined or otherwise compelled to retreat from the everyday grind—as necessary lulls that can offer the time for reflection and renewal, for hibernating before the spring comes again.

🖼️ Contexts

I heard about this one on NPR, just as I was contemplating my own retreat from a stable and well-paying 40+ hour workweek. After 20 years of working in this way, and feeling the fiery career ambitions I once had turn to embers, I picked this one up at Interabang Books in Dallas. As is echoed in many reviews, this book was a balm that provided language to what I was feeling. May writes poetically about the ways in which winters—literal and metaphoric—overtake us only to transform us into wiser, gentler humans (that is, if we can come to find the beauty in the cold rather than grasping for eternal sun).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • We have lost touch with the seasonality of life, with the natural world and its cycles such that we assume, as human beings, that we can maintain constant productivity, constant output, constant “spring”.
  • In observing and embracing our personal “winters,” we can give ourselves (and others) the grace to rest when the inevitabilities of life—such as illness, grief, or burnout—compel us to slow down.

💯 Strong Lines

  • Life is not linear: “…we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
  • On Teaching: “In teaching, you cannot walk into the room unhappy or unwilling. You must sacrifice your own energies for your students’, throw your personal reluctance onto the pyre of their lack of interest. You must do without the traditional pedagogic luxury of believing that the people you teach are lazy or rude or entitled. You do it instead, knowing that they are all straining under the load of their own grief, their own fear, their own burdens of work and care. You walk into your classroom and try to entertain this mass of people just enough for them to learn something that will help to alleviate their woes in the future.”
  • On usefulness: “We are not consistently useful to the world at large. We talk about the complexity of the hive, but human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole. Some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Knitting can lower blood pressure as much as yoga (crafting, in fact, can produce a number of positive effects: reduction in loneliness, mental acuity, and helping smokers to quit).
  • The longer nights of winter offer invitations to explore “liminal spaces” – to sleep more, to reflect more and to thus gain unexpected insight as we, in the dead of night, “repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”
  • Loss of ritual in modern life (an example of the Druids, and their 8 festivals spread across six-week spans, is offered as a model)

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

  • The chapter called “Hunger” (pp. 151-159) presents an interesting overview of the mythology and symbolism of wolves that would pair nicely with any lycanthropic literature (the elusive Old English poem ”Wulf and Eadwacer” came to mind).
  • Halfway through “February” (p. 167) May explores the meaning of snow as presented in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, specifically as it relates to coming-of-age themes and the onset of “adult knowingness.” Brief but thoughtful exploration of winter as a setting in literature.
  • In “Survival,” she presents a retelling of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” —from Aesop’s Fables—that she deftly turns into a commentary on classism, productivity, and worth. I’ll leave you with this quotation:

If only life so stable, happy, and predictable to produce ants instead of grasshoppers, year in, year out. The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years—years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.