The Winter of Will: How Taking All My PTO Became the Most Meaningful Reset of My Year

What started as a failed management of my own time has become the best part of my year. 

A while back, I did a terrible job of taking all the earned vacation time my company offers. It took HR reminding me there were weeks of unused paid time off in the system that monitors those things. I probably needed them earlier that year, but I had pushed thru to hit deadlines. To attend meetings. To show up for others. All while not showing up for myself.

I am a vocal supporter to my team that it’s important to be 100% on and 100% off, I decided I’d bite the bullet that year and take it all at once. After all, unused vacation time is a donation back to the company. Which meant I was out of the office for most of December. And while I’ve gotten a bit better in the preceding years, I still fall a bit short of using it all. Leaving me to squeeze in those extra days along side weekends and national holidays in December. Resulting in what I now do on purpose. 

As a marketer, I even gave it a name. Enter, “The Winter of Will”.

The Japanese have a more elegant name for this, Misogi. Once, an ancient purification ritual involved a dangerous pilgrimage to an icy waterfall. Allowing its painfully cold water to engulf your body, cleansing impurities. It sounded more like a cold plunge until Harvard physician Dr. Marcus Elliott reframed it as an annual challenge, constructed to discover what mental, physical, and spiritual challenges a person can put themself through. In his version, you pick one extremely difficult, year-end defining task to build resilience, break out of comfort zones, and experience self-discovery.

The first rule is “Don’t Die”.

Done. And you’ll see why this was never a concern for me.

The second rule? Make it really hard. So hard that you reasonably might fail. Dr Elliott is guided by the idea that “you should have a fifty percent chance of success.”

In my most recent version, I didn’t go anywhere exotic. I didn’t sign up for a year-end marathon or scale a mountain. This Winter of Will was a self-assigned decompression sabbatical. An intention to just slow down. With no firm plans, no minute-by-minute agenda, and no checklists. All things that are unnatural and uncomfortable to me. It was a mission to recharge, one I could certainly fail.  I allowed myself to chase boredom. Something I haven’t really felt since I was 12 or 13. With the onslaught of non-stop doom news, AI slop invading our apps, movies with split-second edits and lens flare galore, and social media littered with ads, its a feeling that seems to be increasingly eluding everyone I know. When was the last time you were bored? The Winter of Will is my attempt to do nothing so that my brain can turn on.

It’s funny to think about this as a challenge. Remember the “timeout” we got as a punishment when we were kids? It has become an elusive moment of zen for adults. How many of us would relish being sent to the corner for 15 minutes? To stop and just sit still. Participate only in that moment and observe.

During Winter of Will, I try to not plan the next thing. I aim to just say “yes” to the next thing that presents itself. Or follow the natural progression of the day.

I’m reminded of a scene in the saddest movie ever made. The main character laments to her fiancé, “I don’t paint anymore”. His solution sounds both so profound yet so insulting, that it’s been burned into my memory as the only way to solve life’s toughest challenges.

“Then paint”, he says.

So this winter, I observed that I might not be doing the things I really enjoy during the year, I took his advice. This was my Misogi. 

I baked. I read. I went mildly viral on Threads talking about a movie I love. I ran. I napped. I listened to some old records. I reflected. I accidentally got sh*t done while trying to do nothing. I pet cats as I tried to become a hopelessly stereotypical grandma.

Bake it till you make it.

If workouts train muscles, and puzzles train brains, baking trains my attention span. Specifically, sourdough. When a recipe starts and ends on different days, patience is a virtue. That slow, fermenting development of tanginess only gets better with time. An airier crumb the reward of a little more waiting for dough to rise. 

I trained my focus by stamping out 3 dozen sugar cookies. The precision needed for a sharp cut-out cookie is based on focus. Move too swiftly and the dough sticks in the crevice of Mr Gingerbread Man’s arm. Cut haphazardly and scrap dough will out number cookies. Like an edible jigsaw puzzle of sugar, I discovered snowflake fits really nicely with star but not against mitten. I bet grandma knew that. 

A funny thing happens the harder you focus on a single thing. Everything else melts away. My ears heard the music playlist still going, but my brain didn't dig deep for the nuanced trivia buried in the back of my neocortex for each song. The oven seemed to always be ready for the next batch. I appreciated the gentle flurries out the window, but didn't notice as they turned into 2 inches of snow. My once clean apron suddenly had enough flour on it to make another small loaf. Time slowed down a little bit, upon recollection now, what was a few hours felt like a week of baking. Sure, the art and science of making, creating, and putting pieces together is fulfilling. And I enjoyed the pleasant thought that like a sandcastle, these tasty treats would be gobbled up as the high tide of appetite comes rushing forward. But mostly, I was intoxicated with the temporary escape from distractions. Distraction is the destruction of good intentions. Distraction is the vice fighting against the virtue of concentration. The escape from my own overactive thoughts is a type of time travel I suppose. Where, for just a moment, I had slowed down the passage of time enough to savor it.

So with Pittsburgh blood flowing through my veins and Donnie Iris on shuffle, I made a cookie plate in the tradition of my people (yinzers).

Treat the body rigorously…

On the precipice of 2,000 annual running miles, I added a 5k run around my childhood neighborhood. I ran past homes built by the hands of my great-grandfather and grandfather nearly 75 years ago. Houses whose occupants I used to know. Up the hill only a Western Pennsylvanian would pave, named after my great-grandmother (Hedwig Drive). Down the street named after my grandmother (Shirley Drive). Modest suburban ranch homes with big yards, a reminder of the postwar American dream of homeownership. Dreams I know still burn in so many people today, but remain ever so slightly and increasingly out of reach. Halfway through my course, I’m filled with admiration for the familial men and women who came before me. Ancestors who sacrificed self to build community and place for others, decades before I existed. I felt pride knowing their creations flourish decades after they’re gone. A testament to their hard work, physical labor, vision, and drive. Boy, I was lucky to have spent formative years here. “This is where I used to live”, I thought. The neighborhood was once dotted with my cousins, uncles, and grandparents. A few of these homes have never even been on the market. Just handed down for generations. Rendering Zillow’s Zestimate nearly useless. Yet inspiring some personal feelings about Real Estate that go deeper than even the best real estate marketing campaigns could ever capture. 

After spending the past twenty years living in the 8th flattest state of the Union, I appreciated having learned how to drive in the 5th hilliest state, in a city with the most bridges in the world. Age, experience, and the past few years of running “5k every day” made those once daunting hills feel a little less steep. There was probably a lesson to be had on conditioning ourselves to tackle seemingly massive challenges. But I was distracted by the fresh blacktop on a stretch of road. For some reason, they paved over the little bump where I’d pop wheelies on my bike as a kid. That’s too bad, I always got big air.

Somewhere around here, I tried to remember what day it was. Because I had stopped trying, I had accomplished my mission of disconnecting. So well that I had forgotten the date. “Yesterday was Winter solstice, so it must be the 22nd”, I reasoned. I was wrong, it was the 23rd. A wise man once told me, “the best part of vacation is forgetting what day it is.”

While we breathe, we will hope.

Sometimes, I worry there are emotions I’ll never feel again.

Either lost to age, slowly eroded by too much doom news, or just dulled from a life well lived. Recently, I met an extraordinary person. Someone who inspires more hope and positivity for the future than I’ve personally felt in a long time. I’ve long believed change is local. It starts in ourselves and our own homes. Then our neighborhoods, towns, villages, and cities. And then in our state. So with all respect to my Pittsburgh heritage, after twenty years, it’s time to call myself an Ohioan.

In our short chat, Amy shared a story about her difficult upbringing. Enough to be the excuse for allowing all her hope and optimism to be eroded away. Instead, she speaks fondly of the people who helped her overcome adversity along the way. They are her inspiration to help others today. She made a simple statement that shook me, “zip code is more important than genetic code in determining overall health and life expectancy.” Place makes us. It shapes us. It can build us up just as much as it can tear us down. While I do my part to create wonderful places for people, I’m cheering for Amy to make Ohio a wonderful place. I want her to bust the Ohio meme and turn us into the Heart of It All.

And in the end…

As I wrap my Winter of Will, I reflect.

I kept the rules of Misogi. I trained my attention span with bread and cookies. I “treated the body rigorously”, with yoga, running, and extra time in the gym, “so that it may not be disobedient to the mind.” I rediscovered hope by finding someone who has hope abundant. I proved firsthand that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” Luckily, dodging death was never a concern.

All of this was hard for me. It might come easier for others. The result is I feel more grateful, fulfilled, and refreshed than I have all year. I am reminded that I have an abundant life.

And that is my final Winter of Will wish for all of you. “To have life and have it abundantly.”