Pedestrians make their way through the city as Toronto digs out of a major snow storm on Jan. 26.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Jonathan Goodman’s latest book is Unhinged Habits: A Counterintuitive Guide for Humans to Have More by Doing Less.
My home is Toronto, but I’m in Indonesia as you read this. My sister sent me videos of last weekend’s record snowfall through WhatsApp.
Each year, for the past 13 consecutive years, my family has fled Canada in winter to live abroad – Greece, Costa Rica, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and so on. Eight months in the city, four months somewhere else, more or less.
What started as a yearning for year-round sun evolved into much more: an energizing return, of sorts, to a more seasonal way of living.
I’ve thought a lot about what drives this seasonal exploration. It has little to do with seeing beautiful things and less to do with sitting on airplanes. What it does is break me out of the noise of my routine.
Writer Jonathan Goodman and his family coming home from five months in Sayulita, Mexico in February, 2025.Supplied
Routines. Patterns. Habits. They’re the invisible architects of our lives. Some serve us well. Others trap us in downward cycles we don’t even recognize we’re caught in.
Toronto’s is a hustle culture. People who live here are trying to get ahead. My weeks are full of professional and social responsibilities. It’s great. I love it – until I don’t. Then I need to get the heck out. In the four months when my family lives abroad, we chill. There’s no professional or social responsibilities. My calendar is mostly empty. It’s a slower pace. I read a lot, work out a lot and walk on the beach a lot. And I actually listen to music. Not as background sound. I sit and I listen. It’s great. I love it – until I don’t. Then I crave a more frenetic energy, and we get the heck out and come back to the city.
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The magic, I’ve found, lies not in choosing one season over the other but in understanding when to shift gears. The structure of Toronto makes meaningful spontaneity possible. Spontaneity provides the raw material that makes structured seasons productive.
Without seasons of intense focus, spontaneity becomes aimless wandering. Without periods of openness, structured seasons become rigid and depleting. Think of it like breathing: you need both the inhale (structure) and exhale (spontaneity) for a complete breath.
Life is short. But it’s deeper than that. Each moment you have just disappears. If you’re not present for it, if you’re stressed out or you’re anxious or you’re thinking about something else, you miss it.
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When was the last time you took an art class, just because? In Toronto, my wife Alison would never give herself permission. Too much to do. Too many people to see. The days pass quickly. But whenever we’re in a new place, she explores that side of herself for the season and takes lessons. Mosaic. Silver. Resin. Crochet. Whatever is around.
The biggest benefit of leaving Toronto each winter and returning home in the spring is the discovery of something I now call unhinged habits. Its timing can vary and it isn’t about travel. It’s about having seasons. Which is about contrast. It’s about being excited for the phase you’re in, knowing that it’s not always the phase you’ll be in.
Most of what we’re doing, I’ve discovered, we don’t really need to be doing; we’ve just been doing it for so long that it’s become a thing that we do, and we don’t ever think about whether it actually needs to be done.
Mr. Goodman and his family ride bikes along the sea, just outside of Sanur, Bali in January, 2026.Supplied
Over the course of a season, you’ll add obligations, tasks and responsibilities. Stuff. Just stuff. You’ll buy stuff. Accumulate stuff. Commit to stuff. But rarely, if ever, will you subtract stuff. If you’re in a never-ending season, odds are, you’ll be never-ending adding. Do I still need to own this? Is that weekly meeting impactful? Am I happy with the time I’m spending with my kids? Every move forced me to pause, hit the reset button, and re-evaluate my priorities not as they were, but as they are.
For more than a decade, as I came and went from Toronto, I wiped my calendar clean and started new. Every time that I left one place, I found myself excited for the next. If I’d felt burned out in Toronto before I left, I was excited to return – not just excited to sleep in my bed again but excited to reset my schedule, reprioritize my commitments and start over.
Dishwashing machines. Central heating. Fresh orange juice. Imagine if you were from another planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder they would all seem. How unjaded you would be by everything amazing in front of you.
The writer and his family at Toronto Pearson International Airport, waiting to board a flight to Abu Dhabi, December, 2025.Supplied
Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure. An unfeeling. It comes on passively through hedonic adaptation. Do you know that term? No matter how good or how bad something is, constant exposure to it for even a short period of time causes a numbing, a return to a relatively stable, baseline level of happiness.
When something ends, even for a short period of time, and restarts, you feel invigorated and revitalized. There’s no limit for how often you can repeat this cycle. A new project at work. A weekend away from your family. The beginning of a baseball season.
Burnout exists because the clock, combined with the light bulb, created artificial time and removed the seasonality we’ve been hard-wired to crave. This, combined with too much stimulus of the same kinds – the same routine, work, people and pleasures – extended over long enough periods of time leads to a lack of appreciation for even the greatest things.
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Everywhere you turn, you are being limited. This can change. You can change your programming. Your life is not a predetermined path but an ongoing conversation between who you are and who you might become. Returning to a seasonal way of living is the beginning of that process.
We are not meant to be static beings, carefully protecting ourselves from the unknown, sheltered by our own habits and creative comforts. We are meant to be wanderers, investigators, persistent questioners of our own limitations. Every time we choose to enter a new season, we choose growth. Every time we embrace contrast, we evolve.
The reason why I love living seasonally is simple. It’s because the starting and stopping nature of seasonal living is the practice of being led gently back to my true self.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the dates originally provided by the writer that accompany three of the photos. The second image from the top was taken in February, 2025; the third was taken in January, 2026; and the final image, in December, 2025.