Notes from the in-between days
Thoughts on resolutions, wintering, and acceptance
It’s become a cliché that no-one knows what day it is at the moment, but like most clichés, it’s grounded in truth: I had to check the day today. I’d lost track, and thought it was Thursday, but it is, in fact, Saturday.
It wasn’t always like this. I don’t remember the gap between Christmas and New Year feeling so nebulous in the past. It could be my age, but more likely, I think, it’s a symptom of modern life. That because the rest of the year is so busy and sped up, these quiet days are even more wanted and needed. This year has been tough for a lot of people I know, and collectively, there is so much pain and sadness in the world. Many people I know (us included) have been away for Christmas, have spent time with family, have driven from one place to another, and then to another, and done more socialising than they normally do and now - in these few fleeting days - it seems universally acceptable to pause and just be - whatever that looks like to you. We’ve been eating lots of cheese, going for rainy walks in the valley, and watching old classic movies we’ve not seen for a while with our cats. It’s been really lovely.
I’ve inevitably seen a number of ‘year in review’ posts recently, and a fair few that are looking ahead to 2024. In the echo chamber of my feeds, there’s a lot of people who are gently encouraging a move away from traditional New Year’s resolutions1 - and with good reason, too. The whole idea of ‘turning over a new leaf’ in the new year doesn’t sit well with me. It feeds off insecurity and often prompts the setting of unrealistic goals that are difficult to keep. Personally, I can easily stray into self-criticism, which leads to a scattergun approach of ‘ways to fix myself.’ After years of trying to have a baby, I’ve tried almost everything I can think of to improve my health and wellbeing. Some things have been radical and life changing and have stuck, and others have been firmly retired. Either way, I’m done with feeling as though I’m broken and need to be mended, and so a big list of things to do in January is off the table. I’ve loved reading the alternative ways that others are choosing to mark this point in the year, and considering what it might look like to move away from set ideas and resolutions, to something kinder, more compassionate, and more flexible.
And yet, as much as I reject the idea of resolutions in the traditional sense, as a perpetual student, I also love the process of review. In this natural pause point of the year, it feels like a good time to reflect. Time is spacious in a way it isn’t normally. The days drift by. All sense of routine is lost. It feels almost dreamy. Maybe it’s just part of getting older, but of late, I’ve enjoyed this time of year more than I ever used to. When I was younger, January would seem so bleak; so boring. The final two weeks of December would be spent in a relentless whirl of parties and pub trips and family dinners. I remember being hungover a lot. Karl and I would sometimes do Dry January as an antidote to all the booze consumed in December, but that would only add to the sense of dullness - like we were depriving ourselves of fun. We were paid our January wages early due to the Christmas close down, so we’d also, inevitably, be broke by the time we hit the middle of the month. When I say it was relentless, it was, but I had no awareness of that at the time. It was how we wanted things to be, it felt completely normal, and we had a LOT of fun, but it also meant that the entirety of January felt like a massive comedown.
These days, the lull in the year feels much more natural to me. Instead of dreading January - with its long nights and short days; its reduced bank balance and dearth of social occasions - I’ve started to warm to it. Instead of deprivation and lack, I’m more tuned in to what it offers. I loved Katherine May’s book Wintering, where she writes beautifully about the power of nature, and embracing, not only our own personal winters - those periods of our life when we naturally need to pull back and hunker down - but winter itself. It’s easy to forget that we’re seasonal, cyclic creatures, and we’re not designed to keep going at the same pace through the year.
While it’s not possible for us to fully hibernate IRL, I like the idea of working with what we’ve got. Of course I still need to go to work, and go to Aldi, and whatnot, but I’m trying to be better at noticing the unique parts of the season, and the things that I don’t get to do at other points in the year. The concept of Hygge took off for a reason, and I have bought into it wholesale: I love the darker nights and warm blankets and hot drinks and candles: all the things that make winter beautiful. I’ve been working hard on self-acceptance - of actually listening to what I want and need - but I think there’s a greater acceptance at work here too. Of accepting winter and the cold and the dark and the quiet for what it gives us, and not wishing it away.
Acceptance has definitely been a recurring theme of the past few years. It’s something I’ve felt resistance to and struggled with again and again. On some level, the idea of acceptance feels like giving up, (which is something I’ve been programmed never to do), and on another, it’s felt impossible: I’ve simply not been ok with where I was and what was happening. 2023 has been no different. One of the reasons the move to Wales was so difficult, for example, was because I could not accept the way things unfolded. We were so desperate to hit the ground running with our big ideas for the farm, but we gave ourselves no time to pause, and instead, ratcheted up the pressure to get settled, and have a business up and running within a few short weeks. When it became clear that this would be impossible, I was forced to accept the reality of the situation. We were exhausted from the move, from weeks of driving back and forth along the M4, from 3 months living out of bags at my mums. We’d placed a huge weight of expectation on the move itself: that it would be the glittering prize won, for everything we’d endured. When it wasn’t everything I’d dreamed of immediately, I fell apart. It was a big disappointment, and I genuinely wondered if we’d made an awful mistake. At that moment, there was nothing to do but let go and accept where we were. I fought it valiantly, but as soon as I did, things started to shift.
We’re coming out the other side of that period now, which is a fucking relief. And the seasons - the weather, winter - has been a huge ally in the cause. It’s wet and cold, and we know very few people here in Wales, so we’ve been treated to the gift of time: to pause, to regroup, to figure out what we want to do next. After I crashed in September, I remember saying to Karl that I just wanted to have a boring life for a bit, to remember what it was like to live week-to-week, rather than always having one part of my brain scanning a future horizon. I wanted to feel settled in our house. I wanted to meet some people. To go to work and come home and cook dinner, and go to bed and get up and meditate for ten minutes and then have my breakfast. Nothing major, no dramas. It’s taken a while, but it’s happening, and for that I’m grateful.
While I know that the start of a new year is really just an arbitrary line in the sand, that it falls here - in the in-between period - feels good to me. It’s as good a time as any. I don’t feel the need to make a huge list of priorities like I might have done in the past, or to ‘hit the ground running’ as soon as January 1st comes along, but it’s nice to daydream about some of the things that I might want to happen in 2024 - places I want to go, people I want to see. I naturally want to make a few changes, to embed a few new habits, to throw out a few old ones that aren’t working.
Much like my reflections around Christmas, it’s both disconcerting and freeing that we’ve put the idea of ‘trying to have a baby’ down. Every year for the past 5 years, around this time, it’s lurked in the background: will this be the year? I have no idea if we’ll get any closer to knowing whether our own children will feature in our lives in 2024, but I can feel a clear difference in the energy behind these thoughts. I no longer feel a sense of loss or dread as one year ends and another begins, and I no longer feel a sense of urgency: that it's something that’s up to me to make happen. Could it be that I’ve accepted where we are? Stay tuned.
What I do know is that it feels nice to have other things that I want to do again. We’re finally more settled here: we know where to shop, and to walk, and to post a letter. I’ve registered at the doctors, we’ve met some people, we know some good beaches to swim at. All of those mundane things take up space and time, and now we’ve done them, some room has been freed up for what’s next. I’ve started to feel excited about what we’re going to do on the farm: what we’ll grow, what colour I’ll paint the caravan, who might come and stay in it. These wishes don’t need to go on a big resolutions list, but they are little things to point my attention at, and that I genuinely want to make happen.
In Michigan, it gets cold in November, and the trees don’t start to bud again until late April. Here in (relatively) temperate Wales, I always forget how long the winters were across the pond, and how much of a drag it was to still have snow on the ground in March. Now I’m back in the UK, I wonder if that’s why this time of year feels more special, because I know it’ll be gone again before we know it. By the end of January, the snowdrops will be out and Spring will be on its way.
Until then, I hope your January is more dreamy than dull.
Happy New Year!
x
