CHAPTER EIGHT Your Life Beyond
Congratulations. You’ve completed your therapeutic winter. It took you about eighteen months, but you sure feel stronger and more physically capable. No more inflammatory conditions, and fewer achy joints. Your prediabetes is mostly gone, and your doctor tells you to ditch those blood sugar medications. You enjoy stable energy, and that nagging midafternoon energy slump has largely vanished. Mentally and emotionally you feel much clearer, more stable, settled, emotionally resilient, and creative. Because you’ve slowed down enough to introspect, you’ve adopted a different mind-set and way of evaluating your life as you’ve explored more profound questions about your larger purpose. You’re finally ready to start living in a balanced oscillatory fashion, in harmony with the changing seasons. Join me now on an imaginary journey, as I give you a taste of what seasonal living will look and feel like.
Each spring, you’ll emerge from winter’s relative slumber feeling like a brighter, lighter, happier, and more energetic version of yourself. Your friends will likely comment on your glowing skin or suggest that you exude or radiate something positive, something they can’t quite identify. In the spring of each year, you’re inclined to try new things, go new places, and start thinking about a new hobby, relationship, or career possibility. Absent chronic summer stimulation, you embrace these experiences every year, leaning into spring’s titillating fun and excitement. Sometimes your spring ideas are harebrained, and you try them out anyway.
If you run a small business, each springtime you can anticipate more energy at the office. You aren’t driving to work when it’s still dark outside, and the extra sunlight alone gives everyone a little more zest and pep. Each spring you capitalize on this energy surplus and organize an open forum to generate ideas for the coming fiscal year. You consider new business operation approaches and start planning a big sales push or product launch for the upcoming summer. These anticipatory plans are galvanizing for your teams, managers, and general employees alike, and you leverage those positive feelings to create camaraderie in the office.
When it comes to your marriage, you look forward to spring because it’s a period of novelty, energy, and playfulness. Linda Carroll’s Love Cycles textures a cyclical relationship model that dovetails with my seasonal model.1 As we all know, long-term romantic relationships can feel settled, comfortable, and a little complacent over the course of time. But, to put her ideas in my seasonal, oscillatory idiom, Carroll suggests you take advantage of springtime’s telltale trait of novelty to reinvigorate your relationship. This is the time, she says, to interact in a fun and playful way, trying new things or even reverting to some of your relationship’s springtime behaviors, from your puppy love or honeymoon phase.
In her book Mating in Captivity, psychotherapist Esther Perel describes the oscillatory dynamism and tension between familiarity and novelty in long-term relationships.2 Spring is your ideal time to have conversations with your partner about expansion, novelty, and growth. And this isn’t confined to romantic partners. Each spring I look forward to talking with my son. “Man, we’ve had a nice, quiet winter,” I tell him. “We’ve been at home a lot. What do you want to do this summer?” And the two of us start planning for climbing camp or summer backpacking and camping trips.
My mother, Debbie, has always been active, healthy, and outdoorsy, planning long backpacking trips with her girlfriends. One spring day, when she was about to turn sixty-five, we were stunned by the manner she’d chosen to mark the milestone: she decided she would hike an 800-mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail, the fabled pathway that runs from Mexico to Canada. Even professionals have difficulty with it, and my mom decided to hike hundreds of miles of it. Alone. Every springtime Mom starts readying herself for the upcoming summer journey. Each spring, she’s excited to embark on the planning phase as she anticipates the next leg of trail she’ll cover, the mountaintops she’ll scale, and wildlife she’ll encounter.
My mom’s hike is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of seasonal spring, brimming as it is with opportunity for new experiences and adventures. As someone who lives on her own, on over one hundred acres in British Columbia, Canada, Mom can pay more attention and honor her own intuitions and desires. She cuts her own firewood, plants her own vegetable gardens, and harvests fruit from her own trees. I’m not saying she’s a perfect exemplar of seasonal living, but she’s someone attuned to the natural rhythms of the earth and helped instill them in me from a young age. It’s gratifying to watch her intuitively embody parts of my model, even as I’m a bit terrified to think of her alone on this trail. As my mother clearly demonstrates, springtime’s possibilities aren’t confined to youth—they are accessible at every age. And neither are the bold, daring, and sometimes dangerous adventures of summer as my mother hikes several hundred miles of the trail each year.
Each summer of your life, you also behave like my mom, throwing yourself headlong into the projects and experiences you charted in spring. During these months you are brave and daring when it comes to meeting new people and embracing new experiences. You travel to a country where you don’t speak the language after you implement the harebrained idea you hatched with your business team during your springtime planning session. Sometimes you are up so late at the office, making these project deadlines, that you get home late, and don’t get as much sleep. You dedicate the weekends to renovating the house, restoring your vintage car, and progressing on your woodworking projects. That’s perfectly in keeping with non-chronic, seasonal summer as a period where you immerse yourself in intensive experiences and career callings. You also allocate large chunks of time to spontaneous experiences with a wide group of people.
For many summers in my twenties, between twenty-five and forty of my friends rode motorcycles from Salt Lake City to Wyoming. Imagine these bikes loaded down with camping gear, and the fun and mischief we would all have camping together in the woods, embracing what I now regard, in hindsight, as summer’s expansive mode. Now that I parent a school-age child, I understand that summer is a season when you might heavily invest time and energy into your kids. They aren’t at school all day, or busy with their homework and extracurricular activities. During the summer of 2019, when my son was six, I deliberately arranged only part-time childcare—I still wanted to work—because I wanted to embrace a summer style of parenting and all the attention and emotional energy required for being present with a small child. My son and I had a blast going on weekend camping trips, learning how to light a fire, and looking out for bears and other wildlife on the trail.
Each summer, I’ve seen my mom turn into a bigger, more invigorated version of herself, as she expands the boundaries of her comfort zone, and increases her confidence and life satisfaction from embarking on something challenging and scary. As you can imagine, she’s inspired a lot of people. But I’m equally proud of her for not confining the seasonal experience to her summer. Unlike many who hike the trail, she hasn’t set aside a calendar year to do the entire thing. At the end of August each year, when summer draws to a close, she looks forward to coming home, reconnecting with her land, and seeing the friends she’s missed from being away for several months. That’s because she’s naturally tapped into fall’s spirit of homecoming and yearns for reconnection and deceleration. After literally expanding her world each summer, she equally embraces the joy of fall reconnection, and all the people and activities she’s missed during her adventures away.
Having already recalibrated and rebalanced your life during your own fall pivot, your calendar fall each year resembles the gentle life contraction that my mom manifests. You intuitively start slowing down, spending more hours at home, and paying more attention. You restart the meditation practice and journaling practice that got away from you during summer and begin reconnecting with the people you haven’t seen all summer because they’ve been away traveling or busy working. In our hectic world, summer is a time of natural drift and disconnection, while fall is a warm invitation to reconnection. Instead of going to the lake, fair, or amusement park, you spend more time in your living room or harvesting produce from your vegetable garden. As you reconnect to self, place, and others, you start experiencing spontaneous feelings of gratitude and fullness. You also check in with yourself, asking whether you are on track with your life purpose. I know that my mom is doing this work in the fall of 2019, asking herself whether she made the right choice about ending her year’s hike a bit early because of early inclement weather in the northern stretch of trail she was on. (Answer: right decision, Mom.)
You also find value in each fall’s preemptive and proactive questioning of important parts of your life. Because rarely do you introspect during this time and conclude, “Yes, I am in perfect harmony with the life I’m leading and my connection to purpose.” Fall instead is a time to question and mildly course-correct, rather than waiting until it’s too late and you experience career burnout, a divorce, a family estrangement, or the fallout from an affair. Many of my friends, sometimes tongue in cheek, perform an annual marriage or relationship “check-in.” Fall is the perfect time for such a meeting. “Where are we in the course of this relationship?” they ask their partners. Most of the time, when you slow down long enough to ask yourself the question about whether you are on track, the answer is “Not quite.”
As you’ve also discovered, fall’s spirit is retrospective. This is when you assess and evaluate the business plans you conceived in spring, then implemented in summer. How did that big product launch or marketing drive turn out? Do you want to do the same next year, or do you want to modify, or change course more dramatically? Fall isn’t the time to dwell on the past—it’s a time to learn from it, evaluating it with a spirit of curiosity and openness. During fall’s retrospection, you sometimes discover that you’ve neglected parts of your exercise routine. It’s fairly painless, you find, to return to movement after having gone off track for one season. In fact, deciding to get back into regular exercise initially requires some effort, but proves enriching. That wouldn’t be so if you’d been off track for years, whether that manifests in no activity or an exercise addiction.
When you engage in cyclical fall’s nourishing behaviors, you don’t feel the exhilaration of dopamine-driven summer. Instead, you feel healthy pride. Such pride stems from proactively evaluating your relationships and big projects. Sometimes this involves healing an old friendship damaged by some misunderstanding, opening up new channels of communication and intimacy with your romantic partner, or reinvigorating your relationship to self with enhanced journaling and meditating. No matter the particulars, fall feels like the opposite of chronic summer’s fatigue, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion, all of which stem from self-medicating with alcohol, processed foods, television binges, and other analgesics. Armed with self-awareness, a sense of peace washes over you each fall, as you course-correct important parts of your life, realizing that these changes have the potential to manifest in a future that can be even richer than your past.
This nourishing fall provides a great foundation for your average annual winter, a time of comfort, quiet, and mild healing. Having resisted the “go go go” impulse of those in thrall to chronic summer around you, you actually look forward to this time, and the deep connection and intimacy with loved ones it entails. You don’t feel giddy and happy every winter, but you sure feel rooted and rested. Instead of looking externally for self-validation and self-respect, you practice self-care and feel authentically restored and recharged as you explore interpersonal and intrapersonal connection with your anchors. Each winter you lose yourself in a great book and look forward to playing board games with your kids and parents.
After I left for home for university, my parents contacted me before winter break. “You don’t really need anything,” they said. “And we don’t really need anything. Why don’t we just skip Christmas gifts this year?” We skipped them and it was wonderful. No one stressed out about what to buy. It’s a tradition I’ve happily continued my entire adult life. I realize that this is a significant departure from the cultural norm, where Christmas has morphed from a religious celebration to an orgy of consumerism. But summer’s spirit of consumption is seasonally mismatched with winter’s intrinsic contraction. The more I veered away from the compulsive, mindless shopping component of Black Friday and Christmas, the more peace, quiet satisfaction, and gratitude I felt.
Your family doesn’t abandon Christmas or holiday gift-giving like mine did. But after leaning into fall’s feelings of generosity and bounty even more over the course of several winters, you tuned into your deeper yearnings and intuitions and decided to scale it back. You realized that our chronic summer civilization, which makes holiday gift-giving obligatory, is out of sync with the spirit of generosity you feel when congregated with your family over the winter holiday season.
During those winter celebrations, as you enjoy a cup of good cheer and reminisce with your family, you experience a different dimension of generosity. In that space of acceptance and belonging, your family is naturally unselfish and spontaneously generous. And that sense of profound connection and generosity you feel is so fundamentally different from consumerist-oriented Christmas that one year you decided to venture into the community with that same spirit, exercising generosity with those less fortunate by serving in winter soup kitchens and volunteering at winter clothes drives. Since it involves entering the community, such an act might immediately strike you as a spring-or summertime behavior. But if you slow down during fall, and notice your adequacy and abundance, winter can become a season when this can manifest as charity toward others. If Thanksgiving is the hallmark expression of autumnal gratitude, generosity and service to others is its natural expression in the winter that follows.
As you spend years and decades living in sync with your natural biological rhythms, each of these seasonal iterations becomes progressively more harmonic and intuitive. Each seasonal change presents you with the opportunity to reassess, recalibrate, change course, and continually evolve. And this ultimately makes you stronger. This is partly because the seasonal model leverages the power of the “novice effect”: an accelerated adaption to a new stimulus. The novice effect is typically discussed in exercise circles, when people embark on training for a marathon or a new weight-lifting regimen and experience rapid improvement, adaptation, and progress. Thanks to the “novice effect,” the new athletes’ bodies are highly adaptable to the initial stimulus (in this case, new bodily movements). The farther they venture into that same set of practices, however, the less significant the adaptation becomes.
When living in a continuously oscillating seasonal mode, we can harness the power of the novice effect, creating opportunities for rapid and accelerated adaptations to new foods, movement styles, and so forth, every season. Every single winter that you embrace higher-protein and fat-rich foods, veering toward a lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, the more rapidly you’ll experience improvements in your insulin sensitivity, and the more efficient your body will be at using fat as a fuel source. When pivoting to the consumption of a broad range of local fruits and vegetables each summer, you ingest a large array of phytonutrients and minerals that serve as powerful antioxidants or agents of bodily detoxification. The metabolic flexibility you’ve acquired in the seasonal model allows you to quickly adapt to these new minerals, helping you to offset such things as solar radiation in the summertime. Seasonal living allows us to continually prompt ongoing adaptations to new stimuli across the course of a lifetime, rendering our bodies and psyches more flexible and durable.
And if achieving the novice effect and balancing the four keys sounds intimidating or hard to achieve, remember that all my seasonal behaviors are mutually reinforcing. Once you start making positive changes in one area or lifestyle key, the more this catalyzes positive changes across the others. It’s been gratifying to see this play out in the Whole30 community. As online message boards amply attest, when people embark on a one-month Whole30 plan and aggressively change their nutritional eating patterns, many experience larger improvements in their lives. Their anxiety suddenly clears, their OCD symptoms improve, they sleep much better, and are even inspired to leave unhealthy relationships or initiate larger career changes. Upon the conclusion of the program, I’ve heard the following phrase more often than I can count: “I’m strangely happy.” What they’re feeling is a physiologically normal healthy state. They just haven’t felt it in so long that it strikes them as weird or disconcerting.
Scientific research further substantiates this general tendency, demonstrating how the adoption of certain parts of the seasonal model can help reinforce larger improvements across your life. For example, research has shown that increased gut permeability, a condition that can be caused or exacerbated by a diet high in refined vegetable oils, sugar, and refined carbohydrates, allows a chemical called endotoxin, which comes from gut bacteria, into the bloodstream.3 This endotoxin, other researchers found, increased the response of a part of the brain called the amygdala to socially menacing representations.4 Given that the amygdala is responsible for rapid self-protective responses, this means that people with poor physical health—in this case, a leaky gut—are more likely to be threatened in social situations. If someone’s facial expression, for example, isn’t particularly soft, welcoming, and friendly, the amygdala of someone with gut permeability is more likely to interpret this in a highly negative way, reacting in a protective and distancing manner. That in turn means that such individuals may be more sensitive to social stressors, like fights and arguments, and have a harder time drawing close and being receptive to others.
This paper suggests that poor physical health begets social isolation. But crossover can happen in either positive or negative ways. While negative factors mutually reinforce one another, so do positive ones, as shown among many people who self-experiment with Whole30. So don’t be intimidated by what seems like a lot of moving parts in my model. Once you start leaning into healthier nutrition, sleep hygiene, or movement, you’ll find that other elements of the model naturally sync into place.
The Seasons of Our Lives
In chapter 7, I asked you to think about the fall pivot and therapeutic winter as a mind-set and attitude. The same applies for the seasons of our lives, but in a grander, more macro scale. Just as the days, months, and seasons of our lives oscillate, so, too, do the general tenor and orientation of our life seasons. Each of us experiences a youthful springtime of our lives, when, on balance, our activities are more exploratory and anticipatory. We then progress to our summer, fall, and winter life phases, each of which also entails a general seasonal mood or mode, even as we oscillate with the calendar seasons in the way I’ve described throughout this book.
At forty years old, I’m in the early fall period of my life, evaluating and contracting my general behaviors in a deliberate and intensive way. I still experience seasonal spring each year, when I consume fresh spring greens from my garden, begin to rock climb, and make summer plans with my friends and son. But, in keeping with my life season of fall, I undertake these seasonal springtime activities in a retrospective, evaluative, gratitude-based autumnal manner. This general fall tenor of my life feels intuitively right. The more I embrace a larger fall mind-set, the happier, more in sync, and more harmonious my experience of life. That’s because, over the years and decades, we experience our greatest happiness and fulfillment when coordinating the phases of our lives to the rhythms and oscillations of the seasons.
But unlike the development of anchors, the pivot to fall, and the therapeutic winter, it’s impossible to be prescriptive, specific, and detailed when describing the general direction or orientation of multiple decades of an individual’s life. The archetypes of each life season I describe below necessarily reflect my personal experiences, my work with clients, and my research on the topic. Some of these will resonate with you more than others. I’d therefore ask you to embrace the general seasonal principles I elucidate. The specific examples of seasonal behaviors I describe are less important than the general moods, dispositions, and overarching characteristics of the life seasons themselves.
Notice, too, the way in which the seasons build on one another in a seamless and successive fashion. When we embrace the novelty of spring and momentarily lose ourselves in a chaotic summer of career growth, productivity, creativity, or parenting, we are then prepared to undertake a profound and meaningful metaphorical pivot to fall. This, in turn, gives us the most settled, peaceful, and meaningful life winter possible, as we consider our legacy to our families, communities, and larger world. Embracing such macro seasonal change gives us an opportunity to live the best, most fulfilling versions of our lives. If we can fully experience each of our life stages in their entirety, we won’t experience arrested development and other hardships (like the midlife crisis), and instead greet each phase of our lives with harmony and peace.
Spring
In the springtime of our lives, a time period that roughly spans birth, infancy, adolescence, and young adulthood (zero to twenty-five years old), we engage in many activities associated with the planning and early growth phase of actual spring. During this time, we learn about the world—through formal, informal, and social education from those around us—find our place, and discover who we are. Think of springtime as that period of anticipation and preparation for the summer of our lives—a phase of novelty, exploration, expansion, and stimulation. The seeds we plant in the life garden of our young adulthood often come to fruition in our middle, later adulthood. Make the most of it: study abroad in college, backpack across Europe, switch majors multiple times, quit a job you hate and seek out something else. This sort of experimentation and exploration represents normal, healthy springtime behavior.
Too often we rush young people through this exploratory phase. Acting out of fear, we urge them to focus prematurely and embrace summer’s productivity. I should know. I went to university at seventeen, had my master’s by twenty-two, and then looked up one day in exasperation and said, “Wait, I just go to work now for forty years? That’s the plan now?” In retrospect, I should have taken a year off to travel, play collegiate volleyball, and enjoy diverse experiences instead of excessively focusing on academia and marriage. Both curtailed the exploration phase of my life, artificially accelerating my life’s spring season.
Spring is a phase of intellectual and emotional exploration, during which we explore different romantic and sexual partners. I’m not suggesting that youth and young adulthood are phases of sexual promiscuity, but it is biologically and developmentally normal to exhibit a desire to explore ourselves sexually during this period. For this reason, I tend to discourage people from marrying in their early twenties. You’re still in a phase of exploration, expansion, and novelty seeking, rendering marriage a premature intensity of commitment.
When we rush or abbreviate springtime, it lingers on incomplete. One day, we wake up, thirty-five years old, with kids, a mortgage, two cars, and crushed with responsibility and unease. We feel agitated, wondering, “Did I marry the wrong person? Did I really want kids in the first place? I’m stuck in this career that I don’t love but I can’t afford to quit doing.” We can feel stuck, stagnant, and trapped in the world we’ve built for ourselves, leading to psychological stress and even mental breakdown. We might have an affair, leave a relationship, or file for divorce, believing that something more stimulating, exciting, new, and fun exists outside the boundaries of our current lives. If you find yourself in your thirties or early forties with a desire to upend a major part of your life—that is, if a seismic undercurrent is seizing you, telling you to do something destructive—perform some introspection. Probing your feelings might reveal that you failed to complete the developmental work of spring. After all, impulsive, destructive choices are spring’s hallmark.
If you recognize any latent exploratory, novelty-seeking urges, try to create nondestructive opportunities for exploration and expansion in your life. Recognize that these innate desires represent a yearning for a lost springtime experience and embark on a plan that’s methodical and deliberate. Look for opportunities to explore new things. Maybe that means broaching a conversation with your partner about reinvigorating your sex life, prioritizing travel to new countries, or broadening your intellectual horizons with new books, podcasts, or movies. Take an academic or vocational course, start a hobby, or do something you’ve always longed to do, like learning to play classical guitar. In other words, bring those urges and desires to light and devise a plan to address your unresolved spring to achieve resolution and peace, without upending the life you’ve built for yourself.
Summer
The summer of our lives, roughly spanning the years twenty-five to fifty, resembles our society’s default normal—the day-to-day activities we see most people doing. As the most productive and generative years of your life, summer involves going to work, paying bills, buying a house, opening a business or making a mark in your career, and having kids. Armed with a better understanding of who you are and what you want out of life, you can begin executing the plans and the dreams you conceived during spring. As we’ve already explored and likely experienced, it can be easy to lose ourselves in work, children, and family relationships during the summer of our lives. These are the decades when we apply the maximum amount of energy, intention, investment, and work to our lives. These decades are externally focused. “I’m thirty years old,” someone might say in his early summer. “I’m working hard to get a promotion so I can become an expert in my field, start my own business, and later scale it to a consulting agency so that I can achieve financial independence in retirement.” This future and external orientation is perfectly in keeping with a healthy summer life stage.
During these high-energy decades, it’s normal to feel tired (just like we do at the end of each literal summer). While that’s to be expected at times, we must moderate a bit because we tend to pursue our careers, financial accumulation, consumption, and even parenting to excess. There’s a fine line between working hard for a couple of decades and working yourself to death. But if you’re feeling or looking really broken down—beyond normal aging—then you need to physiologically realign.
Look at your skin as an early indication. Intact collagen fibers make the skin look healthy and vibrant, and the release of the summer stress hormone cortisol leads to the breakdown of collagen and the premature formation of cellulite and wrinkles. The chronic breakdown of your skin can occur elsewhere in your body, when constant wear and tear places our connective tissue in a chronic state of stress, manifesting in shoulder tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, ligament inflammation, and meniscal tears. Cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and other types of autoimmune disease also represent the long-term consequences of chronic stress (along with genetic predispositions and environmental triggers). As we now know, chronic stress is a primary common denominator underlying most lifestyle-related diseases and general “dis-ease.”5 Watch for signs that you’re awash in chronic summer cortisol and need to slow down during this hectic life stage.
When it’s time to make the life pivot to fall, it can seem hard or even impossible to abandon the frenzy of summer chaos and excess. This isn’t a personal failing; we simply haven’t built an economic system in which people can start winding down their summer in their forties. In the most generous reading, societal expectation is that, beginning around forty-five or fifty, you begin flirting with contracting your life, and exiting the full-scale frontal assault of summer living. But people can’t often meet this societal expectation as the forties decade often coincides with the advancement of our careers, the securing of promotions, and the accumulation of more money and status. Can you think of anyone you know who’s actively planning on decompressing and winding down at forty years old? Though it’s intimidating to consider in today’s economy, beginning to detach ourselves from summer at that age is biologically normal.
I’m not suggesting that once you turn forty you actively think about retirement. But once you hit this decade, you should begin thinking about changing your patterns in a broad sense, anticipating a transition from the whirlwind of summer to the gentle deceleration of fall. We must begin early because summer’s spirit of accumulation, spending, and advancement requires a vast infrastructure and assumes a logic that becomes self-perpetuating and difficult to unwind. The earlier we begin preparing to remove our foot from summer’s accelerator, the more painless and elegant a transition we’ll experience.
Fall
While the fall of our lives roughly spans years fifty to seventy-five, we should begin preparing for it in our forties. In living seasonally, after all, we’ve chosen to be mindful, alert, and introspective about the trajectory of our lives, rendering this directional life change a lot easier. I experienced my fall pivot at age thirty-five and thirty-six and have been gently leaning into a transition to my larger seasonal-life fall ever since. I’m still in a summer production mode, contributing and working hard, delivering podcasts, conducting interviews, and writing this book, but I’m also gradually planning for the next few decades. Right now, I’m reflecting on how stimulating, challenging, and exciting summer has been, but also looking forward to a fall slowdown. As I now understand, I couldn’t appreciate the reconnective and contractive phase of fall had I not undergone an expansive summer phase.
The fall of our lives is analogous to the fall pivot, a difficult directional change from expansion to contraction and deceleration. Once we hit fall, we’ll likely find ourselves weary from summer’s excess. But we also might find that following summer’s expansion, we have a wonderful fall harvest to enjoy. The more present, mindful, and slow we are, the more smoothly, gently, and elegantly we can transition into this fall mode. Upon reflection, we might discover we need to change our spending habits and discard some of our unnecessary toys and indulgences, like the boat, motorcycle, expensive yearly vacation, or big house. Material goods such as these might have entranced us during the younger, more frivolous spring and summer phases of our lives. But if we can start spending time and money more wisely, we won’t be as beholden to the consumerist forces urging us to keep working to accumulate more.
Most of us don’t need such reminders. Despite the societal pressures to constantly consume, most people spend their money modestly and judiciously, and still struggle to stay financially afloat. Currently we don’t inhabit an economic world in which it’s easy for people to transition from the hard work in their life summers, even when they spend money responsibly on affordable homes, simple vehicles, and retirement savings. With the exception of those who are independently wealthy, this means that we must really pay attention to how we spend our disposable income, as this represents one variable we can control. This is akin to the night-shift workers and constant travelers I invoked in chapter 7—their suboptimal sleeping habits don’t grant them an exemption from a fall pivot. It means that they must pay special attention to the other variables they can control.
When we forgo fall’s spirit of taking stock and slowing down, problems can arise. A midlife crisis, for example, something that typically occurs during the fall of our lives, simply represents an unrecognized yearning for a pivot or directional shift to spring without recognizing it as such. At around forty, forty-five, or fifty, often due to an unresolved springtime, we yearn to return to partying, sexual promiscuity, and impulsiveness. The stereotype of the midlife crisis—the guy who gets a young mistress and a convertible Porsche at fifty years old—typifies someone who didn’t honor each season’s lifestyle variables to their fullest. Instead of recognizing our deep yearning for a directional shift to contraction, we sometimes redouble our efforts to earn and consume more, behaving in erratic and destructive ways. Midlife crisis or not, around this stage of life we see a spike in divorce rates as children leave the nest, as well as mental health problems and severe crises of identity, as people confront their midlife in this youth-obsessed society.
The reason the directional fall pivot is so powerful is that it gives us a sense of meaning, purpose, and interconnectedness, as well as self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Within such a framework, this creates a space for Thanksgiving’s spirit of adequacy, abundance, and gratitude. Most marketing and advertising focuses on convincing us we don’t have enough, prompting more consumption and accumulation. To begin to recognize gratitude, arising from a sensation of abundance and adequacy, simply embark on some mindful meditation exercises. If you start this practice for ten or fifteen minutes a day, you’ll notice unresolved pain and difficult emotions arising from your body, mind, and heart. But I promise you—you’ll also come to feel gratitude. It’ll likely crop up spontaneously and represent one of the richest, most profound feelings you’ve ever experienced.
Gratitude allows us to tap into fall’s telltale spirit of sharing. In the same way that each Thanksgiving we spontaneously share the abundance of the crops we’ve harvested, so, too, we share during the fall of our lives. In the throes of summer work and accumulation, it’s hard to be generous, but as we tap into fall’s gratitude and abundance, it becomes much easier and more natural. We might express generosity with our time, attention, skills, talents, abilities, or finances. In today’s social-media-driven attention economy, generosity of presence and attention are increasingly rare. There’s such power in deliberately reallocating our time and attention to ourselves in the way that Kim did during her fall pivot and therapeutic winter (see chapter 7).
When it comes to seasonal change, remember: we can avoid the turbulence, upheaval, and trauma of massive change (and midlife crisis) if we reassess our lives in each of their seasons, and make incremental course corrections along the way. The most gentle, natural, biologically normal way to experience our lives is through sloping and seamless seasonal transitions across the arc of our lives.
Winter
For many people, winter is the most difficult season to fathom, because it inevitably raises the specter of death. As a society, we handle death poorly. When my father died of pancreatic cancer, I was fortunate enough to be with him, holding his hand. After he passed, the hospice nurse quickly called someone—the coroner, I believe—and he vanished within an hour. In the early 2000s, when I worked as an inpatient physical therapist in a hospital, I saw others were similarly removed postmortem, magically disappearing after being zipped into bags and wheeled away. We’re accustomed to hiding death in our society and we don’t process it well, exacerbating our trauma, depression, and grief. I tend to think that our society’s morbid fascination with horror movies, psychological thrillers, murder mysteries, and serial killers is because they represent some of the few socially acceptable, non-taboo ways we can acknowledge and engage with death.
Ours is a youth-obsessed civilization, where we dye our hair, subject ourselves to cosmetic surgery, and banish the elderly to retirement homes. We’re discouraged from thinking about our own deaths, too, leaving the winter of our lives predictably lonely, sad, depressed, and filled with grief. But while it’s easy to think of this season in dark, morbid terms, remember that after winter comes spring with new leaves appearing on the trees, and crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths cropping up from the ground. While we as individuals might perish (physically or eternally, depending on your religious or spiritual inclinations), our legacy, sense of purpose, generosity, abundance, and prosperity can live on in future generations. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to grapple with our own demise. In the same way that a sense of loss and grief is normal in each literal winter, it’s also normal to experience grief and loss in the winter of our lives. But when we experience meaning, purpose, social interconnectedness, self-knowledge, and self-acceptance, and have a sense of contribution beyond our lifetimes, death loses its menacing, fearful overtones. We might even think about our own mortality as an opportunity.
People with the strongest sense of purpose feel most at peace when they die. My father’s cancer diagnosis in his early sixties gave him nineteen months to experience an accelerated life winter. Because he lived with a strong sense of purpose, contribution, and generosity, and due to his belief in the afterlife, he accepted his own mortality. He let go of life gently, and in a way that I found—and continue to find—inspiring and beautiful. His peace allowed my mother, sister, and me to grieve earlier, faster, and more completely, and to achieve a sense of closure and gratitude earlier. We miss him dearly. But in the throes of my own life’s summertime when he died, I now recognize a beauty and grace in his passing that at the time I couldn’t possibly have appreciated back then.
I’m reluctant to speak too specifically about life’s winter phase—not because I don’t honor it, but because like many people I lack older mentors or elderly figures experiencing the late fall or early winters of their lives who could impart their wisdom to me. It would be arrogant and hubristic for me at forty years old to tell people how they should live at age seventy. My wish is that every reader arrives at the late fall or early winter of his or her life like my mom: strong and bold enough to embrace new adventures. And when you arrive at the end of your life winter, I hope you’re like my dad: feeling good about how you’ve lived and ready to accept your death. In establishing some of the rhythms, patterns, and behaviors that I discuss in this book, and course-correcting for a prolonged life summer, I’m looking ahead to future decades, hoping that when we arrive at late winter, we can lean into the peace, gratitude, and acceptance that we began cultivating in the fall, exiting the world proud, knowing we contributed something of value. I strongly urge you to start that process in a gradual and incremental fashion now, because it’s difficult to accelerate when winter is already upon us. The more we align our values, goals, and beliefs with a larger seasonal oscillation, the better life we’ll lead along the way, and the better prepared we’ll feel when our life span draws to its inevitable end.
As I described in the Introduction, I grew up in an unusually simple world. My parents were unconventional, and never got caught up in society’s consumerism and materialism. That remained true even when we moved from the farm and embraced a more mainstream life in my later childhood. And yet, despite the values my family modeled, I was still allured by chronic summer. My seasonal model, which has been gestating since early childhood, and which began to crystallize over the span of a decade, was refined in the quiet, introspective crucible of my postdivorce years. During this therapeutic winter, when I recovered from an acutely stressful period of prolonged summer, I was able to ponder and introspect. And the outlines of my model began to form. Come spring, the contours of the model took on increased coherence and detail, while in the summer, I embarked on the most intensive phase of articulating the boundaries of seasonal oscillation as I wrote and edited this book. During the upcoming fall and winter, I’m looking forward to slowing down, decompressing, and restoring myself so that come next springtime, when the book is released, I can embrace an exploratory, expansive, and energizing mode for my book tour, as I seek to share the message of seasonal oscillation with the world. Undertaking this process in harmony with seasonal change feels natural and right.
In a more macro sense, having corrected for my prolonged chronic summer with a fall pivot and therapeutic winter, I’ve begun to enter the larger fall phase of my life, where my larger attitude, orientation, and value system is dedicated to decelerating, rekindling neglected relationships, and behaving with generosity. I’ve just begun to experience the sublime sensation of gratitude within myself and the sense of abundance in my life. I don’t spend every moment feeling profoundly grateful for everything around me and lavishing generosity on my loved ones. But having experienced a taste of that feeling has left me wanting more.
As I can attest, we don’t achieve perfect seasonal alignment all at once. I’m now forty years old and not sure what the next phase of my career holds. It’s uncomfortable to embark on the deceleration of fall living. Connection to self and others was a late addition to my model and something that I have only more recently come to appreciate, value, and enact in my life. I’m doing a lot of catching up with self-appreciation, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-gratitude. In an ideal world, I would have progressively deepened my self-knowledge starting in the adolescence and early adulthood of spring, with the assistance and encouragement of mentors, leaders, peers, friends, and close connections. But without my prolonged chronic summer, perhaps I wouldn’t have experienced the deep healing and introspection that allowed me to devise this model and write this book.
I’m certainly a work in progress. Confession: I have four motorcycles. Sure, it’s been fun having four motorcycles. One’s a dirt bike, one’s a vintage bike, one’s a fast street bike, and one’s a more comfortable bike for cruising around town. Superficially, I can justify why I need four motorcycles, but deep down I know that I’m neither a collector nor a professional, and thus don’t need them all. In my pivot to life’s fall, I’m trimming down on summer’s excess, embracing the custom bike that I personally designed and built, and putting two of my other motorcycles up for sale. Such moves are gradual and incremental, as I recalibrate where I’ve gone off track and continually reevaluate: Am I on the right course? Does this feel good for me? Do my behaviors align with my values? Am I matching my behaviors to the literal seasons and the seasons of my life? There’s a never-ending opportunity for improvement, because you’re never going to achieve perfection. But by living seasonally, you will achieve more peace, contentment, health, and wellness.
When we align our behaviors and mind-sets with the seasons of the year and the larger stages of our lives, we can achieve harmony with our deepest intuitions and desires for meaning, connection, and contribution. As we oscillate season upon season, year after year, and decade upon decade, we can have the richest, most beautiful and meaningful experiences a human life can have. And that’s not because getting more sleep or eating seasonal foods is going to give your life a greater sense of purpose. I’ve presented the sleep, eat, move, and connect behaviors throughout this book in hopes of removing most of the roadblocks, hindrances, inhibitions, and limitations we routinely create or encounter as we live our lives, so that you can establish your own processes and achieve a healthy buoyancy along life’s journey. Once we clear the fog, we create spontaneous opportunities to express our highest potential and live the truest and most beautiful versions of ourselves. This has been a book about pausing and engaging in more disciplined behavior so we can better appreciate and savor life, ultimately achieving optimal health. Because as we’ve discovered, people can achieve remarkable heights when they are well-rested, well-nourished, physically strong, and socially connected.
As you experience life’s oscillations throughout the seasons and years, I hope you will evolve my model, adapt it to your own life, and modify it in different ways, passing along the changes you’ve found meaningful and gratifying to others. Let this model serve as a launching pad or initial road map in your journey to self-empowerment, self-knowledge, self-expansion, and self-ascension. Use this model to develop the confidence to spontaneously and perpetually adapt my principles, making them work for you practically. My fondest wish is that this book will unlock opportunities to know yourself better and to express yourself more fully, so that your experience of the world is richer, and your deep and satisfying sense of contribution is as large as you want it to be.