ArcaMax

The emails started early this year, alongside the creep of holiday decor where fat Santas pushed skeletons off the endcaps so fast that the turkeys just waddled back to the clearance aisles. Those emails all carried that corporate form, interlaced with out-of-office alerts and the familiar refrain of "Let's circle back after the holidays."

It's interesting that we all silently agreed that the entire month of December is a no man's zone that thwarts the people who send emails at 6:12 a.m. with five bullet points and a Zoom link.

The vibe outside my window also doesn't help either. Winter in the Southwest confuses visitors. The sun hits your face like it's checking in about your productivity. It asks, "Are we doing this or what?"

It creates a kind of seasonal dissonance. The rest of the country is posting pictures of frost and mugs the size of their heads and talking about how magical it all feels. Meanwhile, the dog is shedding like it is June, and you're wondering if you should put up lights or water the plants.

I have peeled off layers, sweating, and have reapplied sunscreen while putting up Christmas lights.

With warmth outside and the colder inbox, there is still the pressure to end the year with perfect emotional form. But that's not what winter is for, it's for quiet, for hunkering down through the season that only predictability had been the unpredictability.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes said, "Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." This season does not ask for a complete transformation but a reach into growth to hold what is in front of us instead of looming over everything. Tonight, we make a fire for our hearth alone.

It might be the right scale for this specific season. Let's not make grand resolutions or feel obligated to be joyful, grateful, or charming at gatherings where someone always brings up politics after dessert. Let's not expect to wrap up the year with clarity.

Reclaimed time looks less like productivity and more like small, strange moments that would usually get bulldozed. Sitting in the driveway because the song you like has twenty-four seconds left. Letting the kid talk about Minecraft lore as if it were constitutional law. Standing outside in the warm December sun, feeling slightly irritated by it, but also comforted somewhat by it.

These moments do not solve anything. They do not deliver a revelation. They just remind your brain that it belongs to you.

And perhaps that is what winter is in a place like this. A season that does not choreograph itself for you. A season that does not tell you how to feel. A season that asks you to pause, not because the weather demands it, but because your inner world needs an off-ramp.

If everyone else is postponing their attention until "after the holidays," that leaves us a strange opening. Winter does not have to arrive with snow for us to claim a pause. We get a reminder that we get to decide how much of ourselves we hand to the churn of every season.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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