waiting joyfully

Tuesday, November 15, 2022


It’s six pm, and the world is dark.

It’s only a few days after Daylight Savings as I’m writing this, a blanket wrapped around me as I sit at my desk, unprepared for the chill the evening would bring. I’m still not used to how quickly the light dissipates now, how I blink and it’s slipped away for the day.

I dread this time of year nearly as soon as the first day of summer hits—as soon as I know that the light will begin fading. It will be June, and I’ll be watching the sunset from the hood of my car at eight pm and I’ll be thinking, I never want to lose this.

I always do eventually; that’s the nature of time. Still, it always catches me off guard, wishing for the light to come back.

In years past, the arrival of November has meant the near-implosion of my world, a season of intense insanity. This year is different, my life more still in nearly every way, and I’ve found myself thinking about how to slip into the season with grace instead of barreling through as I normally have to.

We live in a culture that likes to move at warp speed. We wear busyness as a badge of honor, exhaustion the mark of a life of worth. And yet, in many ways, the change of season acts as a direct contradiction to those tendencies. Slow down, it says. It’s not light out anymore. Your work is done for the day.

In Danish culture, the concept of hygge describes a lifestyle based in coziness and comfort. It centers around warmth, rest, and gratitude, and is a cherished part of life for the Danes. It’s not fancy or elaborate, but it’s about lingering in simple joys and finding contentment in the slow moments of the everyday—and allowing space for that slowness.


As we step into the darker days of late autumn and face the fast-approaching winter, it’s the perfect time to embrace a bit more of the hygge lifestyle. To slow down. To carve out space for slow evenings with warm food and good books. To acknowledge that there’s value in taking time to breathe and to rest with the sun.

Hygge, some people say, is one of the greatest tools to counteracting the heaviness that comes with the winter darkness. It’s not a miracle cure—therapy and medication are still necessary lifelines that can’t be replaced overnight. But it’s been found to greatly alleviate the sadness and anxiety that can come with the winter months.

It’s about powering down and plugging into the life in front of you—and embracing the ways in which that life can become a little softer and a little kinder.

For me this fall, that’s looked like powering down from work as early in the evening as I can, and leaving my laptop on my desk, out of reach—not a novel concept, but a definite jump from the girl who’s spent most of her life bringing her laptop to bed with her into the wee hours of the morning. It’s looked like turning the twinkle lights on more often, and knitting and doing macrame while watching a comfort show with my sisters.

It's meant looking at the life I’m currently living, and finding ways to build new routines into it that are steadier and better. It’s been years since I’ve had any sort of regular nighttime routine, but I’ve been making a point to curl up with a blanket before I go to bed and take the time to go through my planner for the next day, to journal, and to read a few chapters of a novel. Recently, I made a list of all the cozy books I want to take the time to reread over the winter months instead of only trying to barrel through my ever-growing TBR. I’m going to start by jumping into Pride and Prejudice—it really does feel like coming home.

There’s an art to it, really, the act of slowing down. It takes a level of intention and mindfulness that we don’t always gravitate towards. But the rewards are so, so rich.

It reminds me of the words of one of my favorite creatives, Jenna O’Brien, who owns the cutest loose leaf tea business. She celebrated her business’s one year anniversary back in September, and took the time in her newsletter to share how tea had affected her life over the past few years. “Tea reminds me to slow down,” she wrote first and foremost. “It always takes 5 minutes to brew – and so it’s created a practice of waiting joyfully.”

Perhaps, at its core, that’s what hygge is really about—knowing that brighter days will come again, and learning how to wait joyfully until they do.

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