[The Typing Baker] Surviving the Winter of Life

Published 24 Dec.2021 16:50(KST)

[Asia Economy Reporter Hye-won Kim] Aesop's fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has various endings. There are also several parody versions known as cruel fairy tales. While the broad contrast between the diligent ant and the carefree grasshopper remains, the phenomenon arose as public opinion later diverged over whether only the ant was right. A representative cruel comparison is the fable where the worker ant spends its entire life working like a slave under the queen ant and dies empty-handed, while the grasshopper pursues personal happiness over the community and lives comfortably with just owning a house. There have been many attempts in academia to establish propositions or hypotheses to determine who was truly right. Of course, it seems no one has found a definitive answer.

British author Catherine May contemplates the true meaning of winter in life, likening it to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper and nature itself, in the midst of a sudden winter in her life. This is conveyed through her book "When Our Lives Go Through Winter." The original title of the book is "Wintering." The dictionary definition of wintering refers to the act of enduring winter, as animals or plants survive through the cold season.

However, the author interprets wintering as "living through" the cold season. The deliberate use of the auxiliary verb to express "living through" rather than simply "living" indicates that the action is a difficult process. The "winter" the author speaks of is not the cold season but a dormant period in life when one feels cut off from the world, rejected, out of step, failing to progress, or becoming an outsider.

This book is a memoir that compares the difficult moments that suddenly came to May over half a year?from the Indian summer season in September to March of the following year?to "winter." During this time, her husband and her own health deteriorated, she lost her job, and her son refused to attend school?all happening at once. She calmly recounts her experience of accepting and overcoming these challenges.

May consciously learned how to enter into winter and seems to have aimed to impart wisdom to readers who must live through their own winters. Most people face misfortune without sensing winter gradually seeping into their lives, but the author says winter is rather an "open invitation" that helps transform life into something more sustainable and enables control over chaos.

After enduring a harsh winter, the author mastered a life of actively embracing sorrow. If happiness is a skill, then sorrow is as well. We are taught to shove sorrow into our backpacks and act as if it never existed, but sometimes we must learn to listen to that clear cry, which she defines as wintering.

Even after all the ice has melted, May questions herself thousands of times whether she is doing well. Walking around Pegwell Bay, she recalls the words of Alan Watts: "Life is inherently uncontrollable. Instead of seeking perfect comfort and safety, we must radically accept the endless and unpredictable changes that are the essence of life. Suffering comes from resisting this fundamental truth."

Everyone goes through the winter of life. This book is fundamentally not a story about beauty but a reality check. It is about noticing what is happening around you and "living through" it.