I will not die with the season

It is January 11th and it feels like I have already died once with the season. Any of you living in a northern climate will have some idea what I am talking about. Those of you living in a northern climate and who are stay-at-home mothers to small children may have an even better idea. Winter sucks. It just does. When it takes half an hour to get out the door, and then you are greeted with whining about cold hands and brisk winds, it almost doesn't seem worth it to go out in the first place. But you do it anyhow because staying inside for four months is just not an option.

Back to dying with the season...

Winter affords this great opportunity to put on cozy track suits, cuddle under blankets, drink hot soup and indulge in other human hibernation activities. Which works well if you consider yourself to be avid indoorsman. Unfortunately, I am not one of those souls. I am a lover of the out-of-doors. I am an "open-the-windows, pitch the tent, jump in the lake" type of woman. So winter with a toddler presents a unique challenge of the mental health variety.

I mentioned I already died once with the season. It is true. I should have seen it coming with my 10 hour sleeps (not usual, but great for the patience). Ever since I was pregnant with my first, and if I think about it, perhaps even farther back than that, I have had an angry relationship with these darker months. I'm angry that it's cold, and if it's cold, that I can't do what I want to do in the out-of-doors. I am not good at relenting control, and if old man winter is at the wheel, I hate him.

There is a little light at the end of my tunnel. I got a job. Not a full-time job, but a full-time-enough job. Twenty-one hours a week delivering mental health education to high school students. Not bad. Actually, very good. It is an amazing synthesis of my education and experience to date: teacher's college and teaching and psychotherapy school and counselling. Having ended my teaching career teaching grade eight, I am really excited to work with older students. And mental health is my middle name, ever since I recovered from debilitating panic and anxiety ten years ago.

I WILL GET OUT!! I will get out three days a week. I may even get to go for a walk during the daylight hours in between presentations.

Old man winter, you are my arch-nemesis. With you at the helm, it is a dance with depression where I am fighting for the lead. 

What to do when you can't get up

Apparently one of the secrets enjoying this life we have right now is not letting what Buddhists refer to as the universal human condition - or suffering - get you down.  So the big question is how the fuck you do that.  When we are each born with a different amount of natural happy; a different amount of mental resources to cope with what comes our way; a different set of life circumstances we have to deal with.  The New Agers would have us believe we all got what we got for a reason (not to belittle the New Agers - I consider myself one of them).  The reason we got what we got is to learn our lessons and to become better people.  To become more joyful and more loving - to ourselves and others.  How to suck the marrow from our juicy, beautiful lives.
But what if we feel the scale tip?  What if, despite our best best efforts - despite our intelligence, and insight, and the insight of others, we still feel overwhelmed?
No choice...  We keep going.  We put one foot in front of the other.  We breathe.  We know that suffering is the human condition, and therefore we are in the company of MILLIONS.  MILLIONS of people, many of whom do research on how to get us out of the pits, will breathe life beneath our wings and tell us how beautiful our journey is.  How beautiful we are.  How our love for even one other human being has raised the vibration of the planet.  How every positive thought we have sends out ripples of goodness, because even thoughts are energy. 
We have faith.  We believe in the best of ourselves.  We imagine ourselves shining and we hang on to that image of us at our best because Spirit wants that.  Spirit wants us to shine on the world.  Spirit wants us to appreciate our own precious beauty, to see how there will ever only be ONE INCREDIBLE YOU.