I remember when I fell in love with January. I left New Jersey to visit family in Los Angeles for Christmas, and I stayed into January for a few weeks. Even when I was young, the months from October through December seemed like a gauntlet of activity and obligations. Halloween with the need for selecting the correct costume, Thanksgiving, where we navigate trains, planes, automobiles, and family, and Christmas, where I am not good at selecting, or wrapping, gifts. And during these three months, there is the chain of social obligations: parties, recitals, shopping with and for friends. I do love the holidays, but they are a lot to handle.
Come January, the holidays are over. The obligations are gone. We can relax.
That year in Los Angeles, the cessation of obligations was shocking to me, like the quiet right after turning off the car’s engine at the end of a long road trip. It’s the stillness of being done. That visit was probably the first time in years where I didn’t have to do anything. Except, be in the moment, in the beautiful light of the chilly Southern California winter. I was able to be quiet and just be. I now look at January as calm and revitalizing.
January is a clean slate. It is an expanse of ever lengthening days, of virgin snow, of cold, clear light. It is a clean month, where we can at least to some degree stop worrying about other people and just be in the now. It is where nothing is happening, and where everything starts.
Too many people come out of December reflecting upon the losses and failures of the year. I swear we can be so hard on ourselves. Many of us expect perfection in ourselves, and beat ourselves up when we fail to meet this insane standard. Some of us expect perfection in others, and naturally end up disappointed. As I write this, we are dealing with a truly existential threat… well, two, really: the threat of a virus that we cannot see that as I write this is killing two thousand Americans per day and more world-wide, and the threat of human folly that we can see all too plainly that shovels coal into the first threat.
It is hard to let our friends go. It is hard to watch this. It is hard to mourn those that were lost. It is hard.
It is important to know, though, that we - you - have done everything we could, and we - you - have saved lives. And we made it to January. We don’t know what the future will bring, but we do know that we closed the year behind us knowing that we did what we could, and lived to tell the tale.
I love January because it is the time to shed the scales of accumulated life, and drama, and death, and idiocy, and flying monkeys. It is time to stand up square and be in this beautiful world and look across the bright, snowy fields of the future, and know that the fields will turn green and bear fruit, and know that we will do what we need to do, and know that anything is possible.
I live in Central Oregon now. Yes, Los Angeles Januaries are beautiful, but Oregon Januaries are special. The cold air on our faces reminds us that we are alive. The sun comes back longer each day. The forest looks dormant, but it is alive and it is building itself up and preparing for new growth and another glorious summer. There is no summer without the winter. There are no mountain meadows and carpets of wild mountain flowers without winter snows and freezes to feed them. The world is paused in January, but it’s getting ready.
January is our time to do the same.