What a Winters Training Can Teach Us About Meaning

Enemies. Epictetus. Fiction. Aging well.

May 19, 2026

SEAL. Writer. Dispatches on meaning, training, figs, dogs: nature and human nature.

Michael Easter invited me onto his excellent podcast to talk about a subject we are both passionate about: the dog. We covered our own mutts, the history of the dog, and dog-related anecdotes all those who find themselves smiling against their will whenever they see a mutt will love. You can check it out here: What Dogs Know That We Forgot. I can’t recommend Michaels Substack, Two Percent, enough.

Now on to today’s theme: I believe there is a certain rhythm inherent to existence. If we live according to this rhythm, rarely do we find despair and misery. Instead, we find reverence for our planet and our role on it.

1. A winters training as a test of self

Fighting seasons flow with an ancient rhythm. Spring comes with the cracks of bullets, the summer with campaigns, the fall with a few frenetic fights as if both sides just want to fit a few more in before the snow falls—then in winter a pause, a silence… a sabbath.

There is a deeply primal satisfaction in knowing your enemy is a kilometer away. A mutual understanding. But even in war a winters training is exceptionally difficult. The temptation is to think no enemy would attack in four foot snow drifts and five degree wind chills. It is to lose ourselves to the fact the enemy, though near, cannot be seen. Questions rise: Who will settle into comfort more quickly: us or the enemy? Who will give into the belief that all that exists is what we see with our waking eyes? Who will see further—and then take their vision seriously? To undertake a winters training is to merge the mind with an ancient reality flowing like a raging white water river beneath the apparently stable and solid world paved above it we see in our waking hours.

Exceptional fighters train in winter. They visualize attacks with an if, shoot at the range with an if, sprint hills with an if, stand sub-freezing watches alone with the howls of jackals with the almighty if. Seasonal depression, a belief we can take it easy, prioritizing the passions over reason—none of this has the chance to take root when we flow with the ancestral rhythm of the fighting season. It is here we find a vital sense of purpose no matter how black and silent the night.

Core to the theme of all my writing is that civilization is neither free from war nor hardship—it is merely in an extended winter. Where an enemy once stood all too many see a void. We can see two ever-present reactions fill this void: a sense of meaninglessness, and a practical problem with profound consequences—a lack of preparedness for the trials of the summer.

The crucial point is a winters training not only prepares us for the future fighting season, but it is also a cure to the present crisis of meaninglessness. A winters training is notoriously difficult, even more so outside of war. Civilization leaves it up to us to create our own rhythm or not; to undertake our own winters training in the absence of a flesh and blood enemy or not; to do a bit of water fasting, a long walk with the flute-like song of the mourning dove in the red maple overhead, treading water in a cold mountain lake, visualizing and preparing for worst case scenarios, or not. Each is a voluntary suffering. A refusal to wait for spring. A willful gaze into the future of what may come and a simple, ascetic, contemplative devotion to training for it.

2. Misery is a self-inflicted wound

Brilliance, courage, and ability are no match for ego in those with no center. Imagine being depressed about being the second man to walk on the moon. Not the first, but the second. Imagine becoming severely depressed about being second and enduring decades of alcoholism, gnawing self-doubt, jealousy, and existential tunnel vision. Imagine being an extraordinary air-warrior shooting down MiG-15’s in the Korean War. Imagine the demonic dialectic within this skull, the skull of a man fortunate enough to have walked in moondust on a rock in space some five million years of proto-humans and modern-humans have gazed at in awe, suspicion, as a God, as a mystery—five million years of pain, dreams, painting, hunting, singing, dying.

This is the story of Buzz Aldrin. And yet it is no mystery that being the second man to walk on the moon can make the miracle of walking on the earth a misery, for misery does not exist in reality but in our skull.

Misery is a self-inflicted wound. How many of us invent our own misery even when it costs us greatly to do so, perfecting the art of self-sabotage? How often do we choose to fill our own skulls not with the pantheistic perfection of nature, but with the unrealistic expectations of wealth, fame, love, happiness, identity, arrival? How often do we stop, and step outside at night, solely to see the beauty of the second-hand light of the sun as it sets the moon on fire, a soothing, ancient white fire?

Epictetus was a man with no patience for self-inflicted wounds. He said “Poor man, are you not satisfied with what you are seeing every day? Have you nothing finer or greater to look at than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea? If you really understand Him who governs the universe, and bear Him about with you, do you yet yearn for bits of stone and a pretty rock?”

It becomes clear that more joy can be found in walking in our backyard or a local park than can be had by walking on the moon. No more is needed than a clay path with a bit of give beneath the foot, an eye to the moon, and an ear to the gentle vibrational drone of a hummingbirds wings.

It becomes clear meaning and awe are merely a choice in how we see our world and our role on it in the short time we have been given.

3. First experiences

I was fortunate to experience an entirely new physical sensation for the first time in my life. It was small, but exceptional. My frog brother Adam Karaoguz turned me on to microfiction challenges as I ramp up my fiction skills.1 I had to construct a thousand word story within a short time spam, and it had to be a mystery, take place in a scrapyard, and revolve around a physical object: a nightlight. I racked my brains and could not unriddle the plot, even though it hovered on the edge of my mind like a tangled black spider web. I was standing in the shower, playing through a few scenarios, when suddenly I captured the evil blood curdling plot twist in words. At the exact moment it dawned on me, every single micro hair on my body from my ankle to my scalp stood on end in one continuous wave despite the weight of the water holding them down. I jerked my head around to look behind me because it felt as though a million spiders jumped on my back and were sprinting across my skin while spinning silken webs. I had never felt this before in all my life. It was fantastically new. It was a first.

It is probably true there are two kinds of death. One, when our heart stops beating. Two, when we stop having firsts. If growing old is defined by the dwindling of firsts, then maybe the art of living is defined by how well we learn to cultivate more firsts the older we get, as if patiently growing figs on a branch.

Creation, stories, novels with deep interiority, visualizing the extremes of human experience—we can feel these extremes in our bones, our physical bodies, and we can therefore broaden existence far beyond the merely surface level. This, too, is a form of winters training.

4. Proof of a life of training for winter

A moment that feels like a gift is when I witness an old man or woman who is gnarled and bent with age, and yet whose eyes are lit with a living white fire. The delicateness of their withered body is inversely proportional to the explosive aliveness of their soul. It is as if they did not age with their body but instead grew younger, stronger, and more unapologetically alive. I always have the surreal sensation I am looking at an ancient cherry tree with not a single green leaf on its branches, and yet covered with pink and merlot-colored flowers in full bloom.

I do not think there is any greater proof of a lifetime of training in the winter, for they are in the summer fighting season until the end of their days, and are in the process of meeting it with such vibrancy due to a lifetime of passion—a entire life devoted to the love of the fight.

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