Stillness 1-7-21: We often look to January 1st as the start of the New Year, but my feeling is that the New Year doesn’t really begin till after the first week of January. In many countries the “twelve days of Christmas” that follow December 25 are a major holiday and gift-giving occurs on January 6 or, as it is sometimes called, Three Kings Day. I’ve always felt the first couple of weeks after the winter solstice is an inward, soft time of slow-motion or no-motion. When I used to work in the bright-lights-big-city-corporate-world, most offices tended to shut down after Christmas and only came back to sluggish life several days after New Year’s. When I was in high school, we’d set off on our annual ski trip on December 26 and those snowy two weeks in the Alps still remind me of a time-outside-of-time, not a time to plan for the year ahead. But even when there’s no travel nor business to conduct, there remains an esoteric in-between feeling within us around the “holidays” and the start of the new year.
Have you been taking stock of the coming year and yet still feel uncertain? Are you wondering about your resolutions, and yet not really sure what those will be? What about all your desires, plans, and hopes, wishes, and dreams?
If it feels as though you’re not quite sure how these will pan out, you’re not alone. Next week is the first new moon of the year, so if you haven’t felt like “starting” till now, trust that it wasn’t time yet. But it will be soon: your energy will lift, your spirits will soar, you’ll be more clearly able to envision your hopes and dreams for the coming months. Ask yourself: What do you need to focus our attention on? What do you want to commit to and what do you want to give away? Next month we’ll enter the Chinese Year of the Ox, which bodes well for a committed, focused kind of energy with which to follow your dreams. By then we’ll have a much better sense of how we want to plant the fields of our soul life so that we can reap the harvests next fall.
Yes, by then, we’ll be feeling again the zest and passion that helps us to create satisfying rhythms, to imagine pleasant goals, to feel a rich courage inside ourselves, and to be grateful for the gift of our daily life. If that hasn’t happened for you yet, be assured that it will. As the light of day gradually begins to increase, it reminds us of things we want to do in the coming year, places we want to go, and people we want to see—perhaps not yet, but soon.