I’m not intending to turn this into a Kinfolk fanzine, though I realise that it is not long since I last posted about an article from the current issue. But another article, this time on wintering, has given me pause for thought.

There are usually occasions during the year when Wendy is working, and I am not.¹ Every so often, I use the opportunity to go for a brief break somewhere alone, most often to a UK or European city. We’re both enormously fortunate to be in circumstances and at a time in our lives when this is feasible.

Spending a few days by myself exploring a relatively unfamiliar place is extraordinarily refreshing. It gives me days to think about things, reflect, and make sense of the world. It’s also time that’s filled with unfamiliar pleasures like going out to restaurants alone, an experience that doesn’t get nearly the fawning praise it deserves.

The Kinfolk article made me think about this habit in the context of wintering, both in its traditional sense, and in the sense described by Katherine May:

Wintering is a choice to stand up and say, “I’m not okay, I no longer understand myself, and I must be alone.” In order to winter, we must give up our attempt to keep our head above water. It’s a brave thing to do.

I don’t go on these breaks because I feel awful, in the way that May describes. Yet, they do give me relaxation, restoration, and perspective—and perhaps therefore to stop ending up quite as burned out as I otherwise might.

Over time, with the white noise of her professional life silenced, she begins to recover, like nerves slowly reconnected in an injured spine.

As you might remember, I recently read Gavin Francis’s Recovery which discusses the importance of taking sabbaticals in professional life, and giving time for proper rest and recuperation. Although the language is divergent, it seems to me that there is a lot of crossover between the two author’s main messages.

I’ll look out for May’s book to understand her arguments more fully.

1. As my rota demands more on-call work than Wendy’s, the converse is true more frequently. ↩

My employer, like many, is very keen to encourage employees to bring their ‘whole self’ to work. The idea, I have always assumed, is to encourage honesty, openness, trust, and respect. It is, I’ve long thought, supposed to signal that each of us is about more than our work lives. Everyone ought to feel welcome, and no one ought to face discrimination based on personal characteristics.

I’m not especially keen, though, on the particular phrase. Nobody really wants to deal with my ‘whole self’ at work. No-one really wants to put up with me having a senselessly grumpy morning. Nobody really benefits from knowing about the entirety of my life outside work, not least because it’s sometimes inconsistent with the advice I give in a professional capacity: we’re none of us saints. What everyone really wants is a reliable, personable, moderated professional—which of course is best achieved without feeling the need to hide aspects of who you are.

Sometimes, I get frustrated with the poor expression of these ideas, which often descends into something close to parody. My employer ventures so far into questionable lifestyle topics from time to time that I included a (surprisingly tricky) ‘Intranet or Goop?’ round in our Christmas quiz. I fear that cack-handed attempts at inclusivity like this undermine the wider aim: I probably end up rolling my eyes more often than I should.

An article in the latest Kinfolk helped me to re-connect the rhetoric with the underlying goals and possible alternative actions. We all want to work in a psychologically safe environment, one which fosters:

the feeling that you can speak out, push back and open up without the risk of punishment or humiliation, whether explicit or indirect.

I can see how valuing the ‘whole person’ becomes shorthand for that—and also how that shorthand generates nonsense that is unrelated to the underlying idea. The underlying idea remains valuable.

Actions speak louder than buzzwords. Generous parental leave policies, for example, may encourage parents to be more frank about their struggles with childcare; while a diverse C-suite and targeted hiring and retention strategies may show people that difference is valued.

I’m lucky that my employer does a lot of these things exceptionally well… so maybe I should give them a break on the well-meant, harmless nonsense that comes along with it.