Show Notes
There’s a shift that happens every year, somewhere between the clocks going back and the first frost. It’s not sudden. It creeps in quietly. I catch myself sighing more often. Feeling a little heavier. My motivation goes a bit hazy, and everything, even the small stuff, starts to feel like a climb. I used to treat it like a glitch. Like something to push through or fix. But I’ve learned over the years that this isn’t failure. It’s winter arriving. Winter gets a bad rap. And yes, it’s hard. Especially if you’re juggling a lot; kids, home education, work, meals, housework, your own mental health. But it doesn’t have to feel like complete survival mode. You don’t have to hustle your way through it. What I’ve found is that the season gets easier when I stop fighting it and start working with it. I’ve learned to let winter be what it is, slower, quieter, darker, and shift the way I move through it accordingly. Why Rhythm Helps More Than Routine There’s a lot of pressure in winter to “stay on track,” whatever that means. But personally? I don’t respond well to rigid routines this time of year. They feel brittle. Unforgiving. What I need, what my family needs, is rhythm. Gentle anchors to hold onto when the days start to blur together. For me, that means slow, intentional starts to the day. I light a candle in the kitchen before the kettle’s even boiled. I keep the fairy lights up well past December because the extra light helps more than I can explain. We make time for a walk most afternoons, even if it’s a soggy loop around the block. And I try to get dinner started before the sky goes black at 4 p.m. These aren’t strict rules. They’re soft points of focus… things I return to that help me feel like I’m still rooted, even when my energy dips. Letting Go of Summer Energy One of the biggest shifts I’ve made is learning to stop expecting summer-level energy in winter. Because it’s just not realistic; not for me, not for my kids, not for our life. Motivation in winter isn’t the same buzzing, bright momentum. It’s quieter. Slower. And it disappears entirely some days. I used to panic about that. I used to push harder. Now I pause. Winter is the season of compost. Of dormancy. Of everything underneath the surface doing quiet work. Trees drop their leaves. Seeds go still. Nothing blooms, but it doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. We don’t need to constantly produce to prove we’re growing. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is rest and tend to what’s already here. Scaling Back to What Really Matters It’s easy to feel behind in winter, like you should be “doing more” because others are. But I’ve learned that winter is when I need to protect my energy most. I don’t try to keep up. I cut back. I give myself permission to simplify everything. Home education slows down. Our meals become less experimental, more familiar. Our calendar empties out a bit. We focus on what’s essential and let the rest wait. And when I say we slow down, I don’t mean we stop living. I just mean we don’t try to stretch beyond what we have to give. We aim for depth, not breadth. We give ourselves grace. That’s the rhythm that gets us through. Nature Is Still There - Even in the Grey The hardest part of winter, sometimes, is feeling stuck inside. But getting outside, even for ten minutes, always helps. Always. I never want to go. And I never regret it. Even just standing on the balcony with a cup of tea or walking the dog down the same road I’ve walked all year... it shifts something. Nature’s quieter in winter, but it’s not gone. The bare trees, the cold air, the stubborn little birds that still show up, they remind me that stillness isn’t emptiness. It’s rest. It’s recalibration. Food as Grounding, Not Just Fuel The other thing that holds me together in winter? Food. And not in a performative, Instagrammable way. Just simple, warm, seasonal food that grounds me in the present moment. Porridge. Thick soups. Crumbles. Casseroles. Roasted roots. Meals that war
More from The Slow Living Collective
There are some things I used to compromise on without really noticing and I would explain them away as nothing more than practicality. Listen, I don’t think all compromise is bad because obviously it isn’t and sometimes life requires compromise… none of us are moving through life getting exactly what we want at every moment. But slowly, over the past few years, I have started to realise that some of the compromises I was making weren’t neutral meaning they were costing me something.
I think one of the most grounding things seasonal living has taught me is that not every season asks the same thing from us, and I don’t just mean the seasons outside the window, although I do mean those too. I mean the quieter seasons of our lives, the less obvious ones, the seasons of holding things together, of building. The seasons of rest, of tending, recovering, recalibrating, waiting, grieving, beginning again. The seasons that don’t arrive neatly on a calendar like the actual seasons, but still shape the way we move through our days.
I think one of the most uncomfortable parts of living intentionally is realising that your life might stop making sense to other people and that’s not because you’re doing anything wrong and it’s not because they are doing anything wrong either, but because difference, when it is lived honestly, has a way of unsettling the stories people carry about what a good life is supposed to look like. There is an unspoken expectation in modern life that our choices should be broadly recognisable. Ideally, they should also be explainable. If we choose something different around work, family, home, ambition, money, education or pace, we are often expected to justify it in a way that reassures other people we haven’t made a terrible mistake, it’s as though our lives need to pass some kind of public approval test before we are allowed to feel settled inside them. But life doesn’t need to be universally appealing to be deeply right for you, in fact, it only needs to be coherent to the person living it snd this is something I have had to learn slowly, and sometimes uncomfortably, over the years. I live a life that many people wouldn’t choose; I home educate my children, I live in a small, 650sq ft home by choice, I centre my days around home, rhythm, presence and ordinary life rather than constant expansion, I identify as a homemaker and I have opted out, where I can, from certain forms of pace, productivity and visibility. Not as a rejection of modern life entirely and certainly not because I think everyone should live like me, but because this is how I stay well inside the life I am actually living. And those choices are not meant to be persuasive (a very common assumption) they are simply mine and I speak to those who either associate with this way of living too, or desire to live in a similar way. I think that is where so much unnecessary tension begins. We assume that when someone makes a different choice, they must be making a statement about ours. * If someone home educates, it can be read as a criticism of school. * If someone stays in a small home, it can be read as a rejection of ambition. * If someone chooses a slower pace, it can be read as laziness. * If someone centres home, family or care, it can be read as regressive, especially for women, whose choices are so often treated as public property and moral declarations rather than personal decisions. But someone else’s inability to imagine themselves in your life is not a verdict on yours; it just means they wouldn’t choose it, it is that simple. And it’s also fine, they don’t have to. I wouldn’t choose lots of other people’s lives either. I can scroll through Instagram and see all sorts of lifestyles that make me think, “Absolutely not for me, thank you kindly”, but I don’t need to announce that in the comments section like a woman holding a clipboard at the gates of acceptable living, because it isn’t my life. And this is the bit we seem to forget… not everything needs our approval or agreement and not everything needs to be filtered through the lens of whether we personally would choose it. Sometimes another person’s life can simply exist. When I first started home educating, I noticed this very quickly. I had made the decision before my first child was even born, so it wasn’t sudden or impulsive. It was something we had thought about deeply. It was a long standing choice rooted in our values, our family rhythm and what we wanted for our children and yet even saying that can make people uncomfortable. Because if I say home education is the best choice for my children, some people hear, “School is the wrong choice for yours” and that’s not an assumption, I have literally had this accusation levied at me more than once. But that is of course not what I am saying… I don’t think every child should be home educated and I don’t think every parent has the capacity, desire or circumstances to home educate. I don’t think school is wrong for every child but I do think home education is
I think many of us are exhausted not because our lives are too small, but because we’ve been taught they should always be bigger, better, more remarkable, more productive and more visible.
Opting out is often presented as the answer isn’t it? The way back to yourself or the antidote to burnout. Or even the thing that will finally make life feel manageable again.