A time to savor

Knowing it's fleeting, making it last

Happy almost-Valentine’s day. A holiday to help us romanticize this time of year. If you can clear aside the dinner reservation angst and overpriced red roses and commercial demands of the holiday, it’s nice to have a day or two that explicitly encourage you to tell people you love them: your partners, your Galentine’s loves, your parents. An excuse to eat chocolate and celebrate all kinds of love, to look at how we can love and care for each other in so many more ways than Hallmark can articulate.

I’ll be spending my Valentine’s here on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland, where I’ve been introduced to the word dreich, an iconic Scottish word used to describe damp, wet, gray weather - a common kind of weather on the Island and in the country at large - but which can also mean wearisome, tedious, or drawn-out. A word laden with multiple meanings, describing the weather both objectively and subjectively at once.

Weather is top of mind for me right now, not only because of book writing, but also from traveling to some places that are so weather-y, weather-ful. Places that are defined by their weather, and their landscape, and how their weather shapes their landscape and their landscape shapes their weather. We traveled to the Hebrides from Iceland, where I drove through blinding white-outs as the wind whipped the powdery snow off the mountains and onto the roads and swirled it around the car until I could barely see a few feet in front of me.

En route to the Outer Hebrides

The weather in Iceland was harsh in such a different way than here in the Hebrides, harsh not in its monotonous drawn-outness but in its whiplash-inducing changeability. I spent last Saturday reading a book in an armchair at Reykjavik Roasters, and over the course of two or three hours I saw periods of blue skies and brilliant sunshine, gentle snowfall, blustery blizzard, dippin-dots hail, and back again, all of it rotating in quick succession. I found myself longing to hold on to each kind of weather: if only it would stay sunny until I was ready to walk home, if only it would keep snowing for hours to provide the perfect ambiance for my day of reading, if only it would hail just as I was falling asleep so the pitter-patter would lull me to dreamland.

Scenes from my walk to Reykjavik Roasters

But I can’t hold on to the weather, and I can’t hold on to the sunlight, and I can’t hold on to the darkness. Part of embracing winter is learning how to love something that is fleeting, learning to appreciate it while it’s there and to let it go, and to learn that lesson over and over again.

And so this week’s challenge is as much for me as for any of you. This week’s challenge is to savor.

Savor what’s in front of you

Maybe where you live, you’ve entered the best time of year for skiing, with crusty snow and daytime sunshine. Maybe you’re noticing the days lengthen, and realizing that the opportunity for candle-lit evenings will soon be behind you. Maybe you’re feeling that changeable mix of sunny days that feel like spring and below-freezing temperatures that whisper-yell “It’s still winter.” Whatever the weather where you are, it won’t be that way forever, and so your challenge for the next two weeks is to savor what’s happening, when it’s happening. If that’s spring sunshine, turn your face upwards. If that’s a blustery storm, watch the rain fall. If it’s more gray darkness, put on the kettle. Consider how whatever you’re experiencing won’t last forever, and relish it while it does.

Let me know what you savor. You can share your experience here, or email me directly at kari@karileibowitz.com.

Notes from the Slush Pile:

• My friend Natalia sent me this delightful Tiktok about Scottish ice, which felt serendipitous because not only is it perfectly on theme this week, but she didn’t even know I was in Scotland when she sent it to me.

• I was featured recently in an article about embracing winter and battling seasonal depression by Vox. You can read it here.

• If you want some inspiration for savoring winter darkness, there’s no better reading than this 2009 article in the Guardian by Jeannette Winterson, which I just discovered but radiates positive wintertime mindset and articulates it gorgeously.