Transformation Through Hibernation

A good excuse to snuggle under that blanket...

Welcome to Eat The Strawberry, a monthly newsletter about the process of change and the desire to enjoy the little (amazing) things in life amidst the chaos that surrounds us. The past few years have offered me many professional and personal changes as a physician, a mom, and an individual with myriad relationships (including the one that I have with myself). Eat The Strawberry will highlight stories of people going through all sorts of changes in their lives - big and small, chosen and thrust upon them, anticipated and unexpected. If you have a change you’d be willing to talk about with me, please let me know - either way, I may eventually ask you to share.

(Also, this is a hard time post-election - there is so much incredibly helpful post-election content on Substack - if you are new to Substack and would like to know which resources I currently find most helpful please send me an email and I’ll share a list of what I’d recommend.)

Now onto the first post…

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On a long flight to Stockholm this past February (via many, many early morning hours in the Frankfurt airport), a host of a podcast I was listening to asked a simple question: What do you want, and why do you want it?

I didn’t have to think for more than 5 seconds to know what my answer would be. I wanted time. I pictured a clearing of schedules, meetings falling off the calendar like scrabble tiles sliding off the board onto the floor. I imagined a spaciousness, a beautiful blue openness, where I could welcome in nourishing tasks like walking my kids home from school and cooking seasonally while also staying on top of the mundane home maintenance tasks that tend to quite literally pile up in the form of Ikea bags filled with laundry scattered all over my house. I wasn’t asking for anything extreme - I wasn’t hoping to leave the country for a year or enroll in a full time master’s program. I just wanted the space to slow it all down and enjoy the life I was already living.

Fast forward 72 hours - through a long academic poster session filled with small talk, slow meals of pickled herring and potatoes, walks by a frozen river filled with beautiful boats while drinking pomegranate juice, meandering conversations with a co-worker, hours of reading on the plane. Flash also through a nagging concern about a lump in the left breast that followed me around Stockholm, distracting me while I gazed at the Fjallraven backpacks and preventing me from falling asleep in my room at Hotel Diplomat.

Just a day after arriving home I had the mammogram and ultrasound showing what I thought it would, and just a few days after that I was gifted what I had asked for - Time. Ask and you shall receive. A quick conversation with my boss showed me right away that I was welcome to take off as much time as I needed. I took him at his word, realizing what had just happened. I was craving time off in my bones - it was all I could think about. And now it was mine.

The days since then have flown by in a fog of doctor’s appointments, infusions, gauzy afternoons spent unsure of what to do next, surgery recovery, and most importantly lots and lots of wonderful connections with people who love me and who I love back. And thanks to a few pesky cancer cells who hung around through chemo, I’ve been gifted even more time off. I am hoping this next phase of treatment allows the time I’ve been handed to slow down so that I don’t miss it. I hope to do less, and allow a knowing of what will come next to arrive in whatever slow way it wants to arrive.

Enter “Wintering” - a concept written about by Katherine May in her beautifully hypnotizing book, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times”. She writes about the healing power of winter - the enchanting nature of it, and the grounding physicality of it - the thick blankets, the warm tea, the long nights and the solitude. When she writes about entering a winter, she writes “There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else.” She writes about coming out of winter with a new coat on. She writes about winter as a time of transformation.

As I set off into the next phase of this winter, I hope to bring you with me. Transition and change define the trailhead and we will see where we end up from there, following whichever smaller tendrils of paths arise to take us to different locations that we couldn’t have necessarily anticipated or planned for. Each week the vibe will be different, following the energy of the day. The fall will become winter will become spring and then summer. Until next time…eat the strawberry.

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“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. ”

Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World