It's Winter. Act Like It.

Why start 2024 strong when you can start slow?

I’m hoping the first week of 2024 has been good to you and that you have been good to yourself. Maybe you have even considered the proposal from my last column in regards to resolutions. Long story short: make them, but make them fun — things you might actually be excited about doing.

The list really is endless when you start thinking about it and there’s a pretty solid amount of joy just in jotting a few things down: try a new cheese every month, explore a new town on the weekend, anonymously send hot pants to your in-laws on a random Tuesday.

Just making a silly list filled with wild ideas can make you feel somewhat accomplished and let’s face it, when January starts to set in, very often, so do the doldrums. We need all the entertainment we can get or at least we think we do.

If you’re not into it right now, though, I can’t blame you. I’m not sure anyone who isn’t selling green juice or daily planners is really that enthusiastic about anything right now. 

I always find the beginning of the year to be challenging. After weeks upon weeks of celebrations and shindigs, good cheer and fa, la, la — everything sort of comes to a screeching halt; even calling it “screeching” is pushing it. It’s more like a dull “thunk.”

What was once all aglow is now a bit pale, a bit grey, all adding up to a whole lot of blah. Mother Nature is no help — coupling mottled skies with cold temperatures to create a backdrop to our lives that is anything but cheery.

You can almost feel the collective “ugh” thick in the air.

Much like my own mother, though, Mother Nature always seems to possess a wisdom I, a whippersnapper, have not always immediately appreciated. (It should be noted my mother also has an incredible grace, refraining from saying things like “I told you so.”)

The older I get, the more apparent it seems to me that, in the grand scheme of things, humans can tend to act like the unruly children of the Earth — sometimes ungovernable like toddlers, sometimes all-knowing like teenagers — all while our Mother quietly tries to nudge us in the right direction.

Look at the evidence: right now our world is darker and colder and most living things and creatures are dormant and hibernating and what are the humans doing? Losing our minds over starting strong at a time famously known as “the dead of winter.”

“WE HAVE TO SET GOALS!” “WE HAVE TO MAKE CHANGES!” “WE HAVE TO START FRESH!”

The cries emerge in the form of motivational quotes on social media and handwritten manifestos in newly-purchased journals.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature quietly listens and through the gloom and dark and cold seems to whisper, “look around you. Would this not be a great time to rest, reset, maybe make some soup and — oh I dunno — consider setting all this worry over blooming and growing aside for now? Might you, perhaps,” she continues, “follow the lead of the rest of the creatures great and small with whom you share this Earth and use this time to gather some strength for the coming Spring?”

It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to hear over loud complaining about the cold or the loud encouragement of a fitness guru or even louder thoughts in our own heads about whatever things — real or imagined —we think we need to be overcoming or accomplishing.

Still, it’s there for anyone who might care to listen, for anyone who might dare to slow down — even just for a moment, for anyone who might decide to accept a warm invitation to embrace the colder, darker days as an opportunity to rest. 

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash