Sluggish after Christmas: Recovering from the holidays
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2020-01-04

So there's that initial blast of the new year when everything is fresh, January 1st, new year, blank page, anything can happen, and there's that rush that comes from moving into the new year. 
And then, fairly soon after that, it fades into the January feeling. 
So here it is, that change from December to January. 
Aside from that exciting time right around the 31st to the 1st, the new year change, otherwise, it can be a difficult change. 
During the holidays, there's a pattern of events, seeing family and doing holiday activities, and everything is nicely laid out, celebrating with the family and then recovering in between. 
There's a lot of eating and drinking. 
I think I've possibly gained a pound of shortbread. 
And things get kind of easy. 
I mean, moving up to the holidays, it's like, well, I want to finish everything so it gets done in time for the holidays, and then it's all this family time, and it's almost like the job of that holiday time around Christmas is to have these family events and celebrations. 
That becomes the main work. 
It's like eating becomes the occupation. 
And then, after Christmas, there's this kind of magical time - I like to call it the magic week - between Christmas and New Year's, where it does feel kind of otherworldly, a week that's outside the normal pattern of the year, a week where I can just work on putting everything in order in a very relaxed manner, and it's great, and then there's New Year's. 
And then, it comes to January, and suddenly there's the wide open year ahead of me. 
There's unscheduled, open, nothing to do but work now. 
The holiday season officially ends. 
It has a bit of that feeling of the awakening with a hangover, and just feeling a little bit sluggish and slow from all the festivities and the easy living during the last couple weeks. 
And suddenly, it's this new year where it's time to get back to business, time to get into the work of the new year. 
And that, of course, can be a difficult transition to make. 
It's a lot easier to go from the working state of mind to the celebration state of mind then they come out of that, from celebration back into working. 
Well, I'm still working on doing this in a graceful way, because it does sometimes feel like lumbering along, you know, sort of hobbling my way, crawling before I can walk, as I start to get into the rhythm of work. 
I mean, before the holidays, December, I was in full work rhythm, and then it goes into this holiday time, and that's all part of the rhythm of the year. 
But this is a tricky part of the year, because of that difficulty of getting things moving again when we've been training ourselves with ease. 
So I think an important thing to do at this time is to have a big goal, big project, big idea in mind that can really be the centre of focus, and really start to load that up into my mind, load up this idea of working towards this goal. 
Because the holidays were like their goal, the end of the year: that was all this goal. 
Everything was leading up to the end of the year, holidays, new year. 
Everything building up to that, and then poof, here we are in the new year. 
And there is nothing ahead clearly on the horizon. 
It's up to us to set what we want to do. 
So this is maybe part of the whole idea of having a blank page. 
It's a very powerful thing to be able to have this blank page, this fresh start. 
But with power comes responsibility, that it's up to us to decide what we want to do with this time ahead. 
Now is the time to get all the work organized again, to get ready to go on a new push into new territory, and it takes some time to get things warmed up. 
Start to figure out what where do I really want to go this year? And how do I get this started? So that by the end of this month, by the end of January, that is the time to already be well underway. 
But the choices we make now in this beginning of January can really set the course for the whole year. 
So what do you think about this time of year? And what are you doing with it? I'd like to hear.