The words on locals’ lips this time of year: this is the off-season. Put on the snow tires, chop the firewood, skip town for a few weeks.

For months people have been describing this time to me. Some revel in its quietness, as if for this period of time Jackson is still the sleepy mountain town perhaps it most likes to be. While others pull out a completely different set of adjectives: empty, boring, grey.

From my perspective I’m just trying to wrap my head around the concept of an off-season at all. I didn’t know turning life “off” was still an option in adulthood? I can almost cackle at the thought of my Chicago ad agency just closing for 3 months. Aside from the undeniable pace of that enterprise, I don’t even think folks would know what to do with their free time. And maybe that’s why, being out here, sometimes I don’t.

I wake up somedays with a degree of peril that I have no guaranteed plans ahead. If I make it to late afternoon without leaving the house, the self judgment becomes downright real. One part of that is just the standards I’ve always set for myself in order to feel productive, successful, worthy. But I think there’s a new little layer now– and that’s how could I just spend a day in my house when I’m IN WYOMING.

And that’s the layer I never want to lose. These months, to me, are still great months to be in Wyoming. Everything that makes this place what it is still exists whether its under a sunny sky or white opaque one. The places I’ve learned to belong are still there for me– even if they are under a few inches of snow, even if I can’t access them all right now. The freedom served back to me by every vastness still reminds me of the intention it took to get myself here.

So yes, it is amazing to spend a few weeks traveling everywhere. But maybe its also amazing to spend a few weeks… not. The fortune we feel in our current circumstances and activities doesn’t have to be measured on such a grand scale.

Moment of Gratitude: Sometimes it takes the quiet, cloudy, lonely periods of almost hibernation to prepare us for the next season– because that’s when the sun can shine, and when we, can wake up.