The third time's the charm, I’ve heard again and again. At the time of my writing, this will be the third time that many of us are noticing the breeze cooling, the air thinning, and the bugs maturing and thinking to ourselves “oh, it must almost be time for a pandemic winter.”

The first one was terrifying, of course. It was the first time something like this had happened to many of us. We didn’t know what we were getting into. We were losing people all the time. It was the end of the world as we know it. The second time, I saw so many people become furious. How could this keep happening? Again? And now it’s the third.

I think that, usually, there is a lot of trepidation around the coming of the cold seasons. The sun is out for less time and things just feel more gloomy. People suffer during winter. Newborns are less likely to survive and we are impacted by seasonal illnesses more often.

And a pandemic winter? We’ve only just begun to figure out our emotional resonances, how we maintain attachments, and how we still manage to grow during one.

A huge resource that I have now and that I wonder if you do too is the knowledge that we have been here before. None of us had this in 2020. Even though this coming of winter can remind us of the terror and dread of 2020, make us rememebr all of those things that we did to keep with ourselves, all of the things that failed and disappointed us, and all of the people we used to know—it’s not that winter. It’s another pandemic winter but it’s a different winter. There will be other pandemic winters in the future but it will not be the same winter.

We have been here before. We know much more about what we can do and what we are willing to do. We have seen things that we could not live with change. We are frustrated with some of the same things but we also get to be frustrated with new things. We know ourselves in a pandemic winter and, in knowing ourselves, we know what pandemic winter allows us to become.

Another pandemic winter is coming and, this time around, we have colloquialisms and jokes and memes that we circulate so that we can remember that we don’t face this alone even when pandemic and winter mean very different things to different people. We have more of a culture around the concept of a pandemic winter. We have established certain ethics around how we treat each other and ourselves during a pandemic winter. We’ve even had some practice living in accordance or deviation from these ethics.

Another resource? That I have figured out how to connect with the world during a pandemic winter. There’s the consistent phone calls or knowing who might be willing to meet you outdoors even when it’s cold as hell. There’s knowledge of how acquaintances tend to act and who you might not want to see in person during a surge.

During this whole thing, I uncovered within myself a deep terror of nature. My partner tells me that this is probably an honest and respectful relationship with nature. I had not been aware of this terror until the pandemic even though I knew that I had a phobia of bugs, high places, and the deep sea. Knowing that this terror is here allows me to ask myself—can I fear and be with the world at the same time?

We have gotten more familiar with self protection during this continuing pandemic. It’s the rage reactions, the disappointments, the political apathy at times, and the tuning out in front of a television show. It's trying to make people happy and it's having rules that become more and more rigid. This isn’t always a bad thing, if we can find it within us to remember that self protection is not the only part of us worth saving.

Another resource that I have, of course, is the knowledge that winter is not forever. A COVID surge doesn’t go on forever. There comes a breaking point. Winter always turns into spring where I live. I love having the certainty of this knowledge. It feels right with my Saturnian nature. It feels like a nice fact that nothing can change. Time always passes.

In the beginning of the pandemic, there was this horrible and elating feeling of having lost time. Now, it’s obvious that we will never go back to 2019. It turns out that we don’t lose time after all. We don’t lose time when capitalism slows.

Another pandemic winter is coming. This means that another pandemic winter will soon end and that we’ll see infection rates come down and the sun stay out longer. We have gotten to know our protection very well and familiarity may just very well produce creativity. We continue to create new ethics around pandemics and winters and we know that these ethics are meaningful even when we struggle with them. And, once the pandemic winter is over, we will turn another year older with the rest of the world. We haven’t lost time. We never will.