I don’t know if anyone can relate, but I have this thing where I visualise time along a horizontal line. This is probably the most obvious way of visualising it since we’re surrounded by calendars and grow up dragging x-axes in maths class. Still, I see my life along this line, and I can mentally pick any point of it and zoom in, to see the month, week, day, hour and even minute as my smallest unit. Visualizing this line is something that I do involuntarily most of the time, or voluntarily when I am reflecting on my life. It gives me a great sense of self-awareness about the time my soul and spirit spend in my body, the time I am given to live physically. All of this to say that, during winter time, I find myself walking long this line a lot more compared to the rest of the year.

I am more conscious about life moving forward, about the past becoming the past and realising that the future is so immediate there’s not way to escape it. I suppose that my feelings are perhaps conventional based: Winter, Christmas and New Year’s are usually events that indicate an end, a time for reflection and for some a sort of re-brith to makes promises and resolutions.

But to me there’s more than that. If I think about it, winter is when I’m truly mindful about my life, in a way that almost makes me feel uncomfortable. No “almost”, it does. During Spring and Summer, my body and soul go through so much transformation, I feel like I grow wings. And all that time I am flying above life, nothing can touch me, I am thoughtless, sorrowless and light-hearted. I rarely find myself visualising the timeline of my life. I’m just me within the boundaries of my flesh, feeling kind of like I’m at a really fun party. I am me at a party.

But now, those boundaries are broken, and I almost feel like I’m melting around, leaving pieces of me everywhere I go. I feel almost disturbed by how similar I perceive my body to be to the frozen leaves, the hard earth and the dry wind. I don’t see myself just for me, but for some piece of a greater body. And there are so many things I want to do, but I feel heavier, like I need to put more thought into them. A summer day without doing nothing seems like an hour compared to a winter day without doing nothing. But I can’t really tell if I feel better in one season or the other. It’s not better or worse, but how much I feel myself as real, or maybe just different perceptions of the real me: I’m sure there can’t just be a single one.

I see how much the line has extended throughout the year and I realise I’ve gone through all that time and growth but without ever truly taking it in. And now I’m trying to breathe it all, so that it’ll be part of my flesh ready for the next warm season. I guess it’s a balance we need, to feel care-free half year, and more thoughtful the other half. Does that, then, make me more mindful when I have no worry for where I’m at and what I’m doing, or when I’m reflecting so much I feel like everything is heavier? I don’t know.

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