Handling the Wintertime Blues

It’s the dead of winter. It’s cold, snowy, and gray. The streets are unsafe, the drivers are worse. It’s even hard to get to your car, trudging through snow, slush and ice, carrying small children, diaper bags, school bags, lunch boxes, and maybe even a purse for yourself. You don’t want to go anywhere, and yet if you stay in the house any longer with the kids fighting, you are really going to lose it. Are you a “desperate housewife,” a sufferer of Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD) or just generally miserable?

As much as I despise winter and all of the hardships that come along with it, I’m experimenting with the yogic concept of contentment. What is contentment? The dictionary reads: “the state, quality, or fact of being contented {having or showing no desire for something more or different; satisfied]”. My yoga teacher, Jeff Logan, says that being content is like forgetting to bring your yoga mat to class and not spending the whole class time thinking, “I don’t like using other people’s mats; how could I have forgotten mine?” Contentment is accepting whatever life has brought you, and just dealing with it. Since I don’t like thinking of myself as a desperate housewife, and I don’t think I am a sufferer of SAD, I decided that living life being generally miserable would be – well – miserable. So I have recently started to look for contentment. I stumbled upon the probably not so original idea that contentment might be found by focusing on the bigger picture. Yogis end their practices by surrendering themselves to either God or the vastness of the universe. Obviously, I am not an enlightened being because that concept is too obscure for me to employ in my search. But I can still find vastness that is not quite so infinite. Instead of looking at each day as a collection of smaller hardships, I’ve been trying to focus on the fact that I am living a life that is better than I ever dreamed. In addition to having a wonderful husband and two great kids, I have the opportunity to write freelance (a less than lucrative job -- I guess I can’t avoid a little negativity.) Perhaps when the winter blues get you down, you can try to focus on the more important aspects of your life and see if you are able to find a moment of contentment. It’s just an experiment – give it a try.