50 Grey Shades

‘It was great to get January over but now there's February!’.

And just as you hoped that February might bring some better weather, the same pattern has continued. One day after another of relentlessly low grey skies. It is true that, in our neck of the woods anyway, we have had a few brilliantly sunny days but they have often quickly reverted to type - grey skies, dark grey, light grey, indeterminate grey, damp grey, not-really-daylight grey. The occasional bursts of sunshine have only served to emphasise just how gloomy it has been for the most part.

It has reminded me of the allegorical novel by C.S.Lewis called The Great Divorce about heaven and hell. Hell is not all fire and brimstone. No, hell is oppressive greyness. For Lewis, hell is ‘the grey town’. People wait at a bus stop in the grey gloom hoping for a ride to the sunlit uplands. Some just give up waiting.

Some readers of this blog live in places which will have been warm and sunny for the last couple of months but many will, like us, have lived through these grey days and wearied of them. Before I retired I would have noticed all this much less. The demands of work would have absorbed me enough that I would not really notice the weather too much.Now it has become a more important part of the backdrop to our lives.

Of course there are many ways in which we can distract ourselves… reading, writing, TV, NetFlix, box sets, social media, travel, visits from and to friends, baking, planning the garden for the summer. And it is important to get exercise in the fresh air if you are able. But you can’t do these all the time.

Greyness is not all about the weather, the low cloud, the half-light. Just as important is the ‘internal weather’. What is going on inside us, our state of mind – which of course may be affected by the weather. The NHS recognises such a thing as ‘seasonal affective disorder’(SAD) and takes it seriously.

A few days have brought a hint of spring in the air. The daffodils are always bearers of colour and hope. These may bolster that inner resilience which refuses to be bowed by external circumstances. It is both tough and fragile. It’s important to nurture it as best we can. One way of doing it is to do small things and feel a sense of achievement in them. Of course it does not resemble the sense of achievement which we may have had when we had a nameplate on our door, wore a badge or uniform or gave orders to people. When we were important…or, rather, thought ourselves so. But now we may be in a different phase of life. There is perhaps something to be learned about ordinariness. No drama, no great achievements, no status. Just raw being. No easy props for our identities. Maybe it is our opportunity to find some parts of ourselves which were hitherto undiscovered.

It’s like what Anglicans ‘ordinary time’ between the great festivals of the Christian calendarlike Christmas, Lent and Easter. Just one day undistinguished from the next. French writer Andre Gide once said: ‘The colour of truth is grey’. Another sage has it that ‘grey has no agenda’. Maybe grey days can yield a harvest of insight. Grey days are like fields lying fallow. Resting waiting for more fruitful times!

We have no easy answers on how to manage seemingly unending greyness. Our purpose in writing here is to hear how our readers may have coped with the oppressive days. It is a very individual thing. But there may be some underlying things which are worth sharing.