In your youth, or in the beginning of your work on yourself when you should have some zest for life, you must throw away your winter garments, or get rid of your negative attitudes. At this stage you will know you do not have much time. The sequence of the seasons symbolises growth within yourself, from spring, summer, autumn, to winter. You must be very careful at the beginning to protect and nurture the new growth because you are not given much time before everything dies and returns to the dead ground within yourself. You are told to keep working, to not waste time. The winter represents the negative or passive aspect. Once you have struggled through the winter, something new is created in the spring, the new arising. The spring is your new birth. In the Christian gospels, Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born again, not as a baby, but in the spirit.