Wintering Towards Meaning

In the summer of 2020, as the world was turning inward due to Covid, I found myself doing the same. I was increasingly cut off – not only from people, but from the coaching practice I had built over sixteen years. For some time already, I had grown weary of the incessant need to “market myself,” with all the energy and cost that demanded. As my beloved practice dwindled and the familiar world shut down, it felt as though life itself was quietly pointing me toward something essential.

I recognized the feeling. I had been here before. My inner world was calling me to start a project that would require a deep inward turn – a call of meaning arising amid uncertainty and a haze of ominous news. In the stillness, I heard a familiar question: “Ronnie, now what? What will be your path of purpose and meaning when the old paths seem to be coming to an end?”

I sensed where I needed to go, even if I did not yet have language for it. My longing was for deep research, but not of a purely academic kind. This was personal. Looking back, many of my earlier academic choices had not fully emerged from a clear sense of who I was. Now, at age sixty-one, I felt ready to choose differently – to follow what I can only call a path of the heart. By the end of that year, I enrolled in a doctoral program that invited me to weave my own story together with those of others, as part of the research itself.

As is often the case when one answers an inner call, the path was neither clear nor well-trodden. I chose to study second-generation Holocaust survivors in the second half of life, exploring how they understood, in retrospect, the impact of the Holocaust on their lives. I had entered the world of Sage-ing only a year earlier, yet already the perspective of viewing life from an elder’s vantage point had begun to take hold. I was struck by how little this subject had been explored. I found myself wondering whether this doorway had been waiting to be noticed – or whether I was finally ready to see it.

I initially proposed interviewing six individuals. I eventually interviewed forty-one, from eleven different countries. My curiosity and commitment knew no end. For the final, personal chapter of my dissertation, I did something I had only dreamed of doing: I traveled alone to Dyatlovo, the small town in Belarus where my father was born and where his family was murdered, along with thousands of other Jews in the area. I lived for a week in a modest home with an elderly couple, sharing with them my father’s story, my research, and – inevitably – my own life journey.

On my last evening there, I showed them a ten-minute film of my father’s testimony, with Russian subtitles. We wept together as they embraced me, saying, “We have never heard this story in this way.”

Only later did I begin to understand that this period was not simply an ending, but a form of wintering – one that allowed something essential in me to ripen. I still do not know exactly what name to give it. What I do know is that winter asked for stillness, and stillness revealed what mattered most. In that quiet fidelity to meaning, I sensed that life might be leading me – gently and faithfully – along a path that only I could walk, at that moment, in that way.