Oh January… you most auduous of days and weeks and month!
It’s always a hard month with the hardest week of the year, the first week back at work coming off the most wonderful time of the year when the world takes a collective pause from the grind and goes full tilt into happiness mode. It is the month with the longest week; FIVE WHOLE WEEKS, the longest days to pay day SIX WEEKS for some and with the crappiest weather this side of the world… deep, deep winter as we are having it right now in England. There is snow on the ground, and the temperatures have plummeted into single minus digits, heavy winter coats and tights at the ready y’all. It is no fun, these are inside weather days, but we have to be outside because life has all the needs it requires us to fulfil like being outside and interacting with inboxes. January, a month full of Mondays, the bluest of Mondays and the shortest of day light. January is hard for me because I Christmas hard, and I do not like Mondays thus to be faced with a month of Mondays in the dead of winter, is all parts tragic. I read, and stay indoors whenever I can, light candles and watch movies full of comfort even if they are crime series that I am currently watching as I type this. Delhi Crime by the way.
So how do we ease into it?
We ease into it by being gentle with ourselves, taking care and trying to get 8 hours in bed and move our bodies. I say this as someone who has made that promise, not resolution, to herself to hop on the peloton more and if not the peloton, step outside my yard on a weekend for a brisk winter walk. If the sun is shining the weather will be sweet on your skin too… if you got that references, you are of a particular age, and are welcome here.
January is also a month we get to have the big reset; however you do it, however you choose to look at it, it is the clean slate where we were to take on or shed parts of ourselves, we no longer desire to be associated with. We get to start new hobbies or go back to half done ones; we get to detox digitally or stay in the frame of whatever. We get to redefine ourselves but also remember it is the same old self that has seen us through the last year, 2025… what a doozy but we made it through. It is also a time we get to put things in context, the day job may suck but the ability not to be able to pay the mortgage sucks even more, you might work with some of the most eye roll inducing people but its eight hours, and here is another thing, give the day job the eight hours in the words of Dolly, working 9 to 5 but try hard to make it stop at 5pm because we are not taking it home with us at the end of a gnarly day. We get to fill the rest of our days with things we love, reading on the train on the bus, listening to an audio book on the walk home, coming home and cooking a lovely dinner, opening a bottle of wine, making a new cocktail you’ve been tinkering with, getting out a new notebook and filling it with all the many grand plans we might have, indulging in an evening routine that leans into the lens of a gentle unravelling. Shedding the day and ushering in the evening… we get to set the tone for those things and the year ahead and we hopefully get to have them stick the landing of the days and months as they come.
I really hope that helps because we got this!
Happy New Year!