It's the time of year when the winter, which has been building and blowing for two or three months in most places by now, seems to have settled in for the long haul and people begin to look to spring, still several months off.
Hot chocolate and spirits run low, and no one has the will to unwrap themselves from flannel sheets and wool blankets tucked into the couch. Stuck in the rut of snowdrifts and frozen pipes and icy roads, minds begin to wander, and inevitably they wander to those thoughts of failure and longing that most have been able to sweep under the rugs of summertime and BBQs and holiday cheer and the romance of the first snowfall. But the blanket of winter cannot keep warm those feelings of contentment, and come February, they are packed away with tiki torches and tents, and then the Christmas decorations, to lay dormant until the next season.
Replacing the cozy feelings of hope are rumblings of discontent, fault-finding introspection and repining retrospection. People who, during music festival season, seem comfortable in their own skin, their perfect costume, are now itching to get out of it. Lamentations of "who am I" and "what really makes me happy" litter the blogosphere and facebook and idle conversations over one-too-many pints of beer. It starts out as a philosophical debate with the self, and iterates and reiterates and diminishes into it's very foundation: a discontentment that rarely crosses the line into unhappiness but always teeters into the realm of sad abandon.
The seemingly boundless winter makes it easier to focus on the self that we have lost somewhere along the way, and I see the melancholy in faces and facebooks everywhere. Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? Do short winter days and cold winter nights and the inevitable winter confinement alloy without fail into the perfect storm for primordial philosophy and the art of the malcontent? To what end do we unceasingly persevere in our self-criticisms and our "what could have beens"?
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