I’ve not always been ready to make resolutions at the start of January.
Some years I pushed myself. This will be my year, I’d promise myself, as I bought or pulled out yet another notebook – or a series of notebooks, like one year when I wrote a different word on each one, like “creativity” and “rest” and “marketing” and thought I’d use different notebooks for different things…
Those notebooks lasted the grand sum of about three days (and that’s being generous), and towards the end of the year I found them, kept one, and threw the rest away because they were empty but for one note or sketch.
Other years I wrote out long lists of resolutions. “I resolve to walk every day,” I’d write, because I was already doing it, and then I’d list out about a hundred other things which sounded good. By the end of the year I might have walked more but I’d forgotten about the others.
So this year I was mulling all this over during the week between Christmas and New Year. I’d organised it well – I had a very full, very busy pre-Christmas with my family in the States, but I still got back to the island in time to have a full week to rest before I started work again.
I slept. (A lot.) I watched movies. I went for long walks by the sea. I read books (actual, physical books). I unpacked a few of the remaining boxes from my move. I met up with friends. I got creative headspace.
And I didn’t write down a single resolution, or open a single new notebook.
I just let things float in and out of my head and I wondered about them.
The one I wondered about most was this tradition of a new year in January.
It really doesn’t make sense to me. January is smack-dab in the middle of a deep cold winter (especially for me, living on an island up north in Scotland). Nature itself is still hibernating, still thinking. There are no buds on the trees. The ground is cold and frozen, like rock. There’s snow and ice, and frost every morning on my windows.
It’s a time for being cosy and wrapping up. Or going outside in the freezing air and walking for hours – and then coming inside to drink hot mulled things and wrap up by the fire.
And maybe, if you have some headspace, starting to reflect on the last year and consider the one coming ahead.
But all of that was just barely started in that week I had off, and I didn’t come to any great conclusions yet.
By the end of the week, in my thinking and reading, I came across a few posts and thoughts from others which met my thinking, and which suggested that January was too early for actually resolving anything. January was still winter, time for the considering.
January was for reflection.
After the reflecting could come the resolving.
Now, I’m actually a fan of resolving things when it’s time to resolve them. Realised in May that you’re not actually happy living where you are, and want to move house? Resolve to move house in the next six months. Discovered in October that you’ve got the idea for another book, and started writing it? Get it finished and start publishing it in the spring. The time of year doesn’t matter if your previous thinking on the matter leads you to a decision. Make the decision. Resolve the thing.
I’m also a fan of rhythms, and patterns. I think what we all love about making resolutions in January is that it’s a marker, a point to look back to. Every year we finish out the year and start a new one. Everyone else is talking about resolutions. There’s a fresh blanket of snow, perhaps. We start work after having been off for a solid week or two weeks and we have some headspace.
I believe most January resolutions are a reflection of things which have been considered for some time. They’ve been hovering in the background for months. You’ve been thinking about it and now the new fresh new year is a time to take action.
But if you haven’t had that time to reflect, you still need it. I definitely do. Last autumn was one of the toughest, most exhausting times of my life in many areas. I came to some decisions about my marketing agency and how we were structured, and implementing them took more energy and time and brain space than I expected. At the same time I’d just moved house to an island and was adjusting to that. As well as traveling to work conferences. My resolution and action happened in October, and the impact in November and December….so now in January I found myself pretty weary. Needing rest. Needing some time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, how I got to the place I’d been in.
So I’ve decided that January is my month for reflection. I’m going to let things simmer. Review, read back. Consider. Ask for help. Have conversations with fellow agency owners. Stir up energy and excitement again.
By February I’ll be in a place for resolutions. My birthday is in early Feb, which is also a perfect time for new starts. After all, it’s really the marker of time that we need. “Last year at this time I was…” “Next year at this time I will be…” and we can see it and feel it and check the progress on it.
So the Gregorian New Year may start in January, but my own personal New Year starts on the 3rd of Feb.
