You may have noticed that it’s December. (Yeah, no kidding, right?) Suddenly, in addition to your normal workload, there’s shopping, party planning (and party-going), gifts to wrap, foods to bake, a whirl of “optional” activities in a month that by rights should be calm and cozy.
Calm and Cozy?
Seriously! Because of the cold and the long nights, in times past, people just hunkered down with family, kept a good fire going, and went to bed early. They’d been working almost non-stop since the ground warmed up in the spring, and they were due a rest.
Nowadays very few of us follow the rhythm of the seasons our agrarian forebearers did. There’s not real reason you have to, if you have your own season of rest. But most people don’t and that’s the problem.
Sure, you say, I’ll relax after the holidays. In January, we things aren’t so crazy.
That’s not going to happen.
You’re not going to make New Year’s resolutions? You’re not going to notice the pervasive Hoo-Ah! atmosphere of the entire Western world girding its loins to do better this year?
Nope. Your only hope for Calm and Cozy is this:
Purge.
Does it sound extreme? It isn’t. You have 3 weeks til Christmas. THREE. WEEKS. Statistically, what are your chances of doing everything you wanted to do this year, in that time? Nil.
I myself had airy-fairy plans of clearing my to-do list and starting the year with a blank slate. Common sense re-emerged to remind me that I over-schedule myself now, and I will over-schedule myself in 2012 too.
I won’t rest in December. I won’t rest in January. I will never, ever rest — — — unless I change something now.
I need to get rid of the old to make way for the new; projects I’m not excited about, maintenance I might as well farm out, great ideas that just aren’t me. I need to clear all that away so the fun re-emerges, like the sun on the Winter Solstice.
Maybe a change is as good as a rest.
How about you? What do you need to change to make room for what you really want?
[ssbp]
