Independent of each other, people who’ve never met published this poem to three different Discord and Slack groups over the past week.
They’re onto something, each of these people. January does stretch on and on, whether you’re in the frozen, hibernating northern hemisphere or the languid, summery southern one (although I think it’s different in China, thanks to your New Year celebrations).
Plenty – the majority, even – of months have 31 days. January isn’t long purely in length. I think it’s long in EXPECTATIONS. We start our calendar years, personally and professionally, imagining a surge of energy and activity.
We make resolutions.
We make strategic plans.
We think big, hopeful thoughts.
And those big thoughts can be hard to sustain. Maybe we’re tired from that end of year holiday period. Maybe we planned big but didn’t have the resources: we meant to go to the gym every day, but we also have a ton of new business to manage, or we meant to start that big program, but it’s not as easy to hire as we hoped. Maybe we just hadn’t fully thought out what the thing was that we wanted to start, and it’s hard to fully commit to action without a clear vision.
Starting is exciting!
And.
Starting is hard work. It means sorting out schedules and people and money – which in both a personal and a professional sense is a lot more challenging this year than it has been.
Today we’ve passed the start. JANUARY IS OVER. The year is fully begun. It’s too late to wish people “happy new year” if you haven’t seen them. And then comes FEBRUARY. Where I live, in the Mid-Atlantic US, the days are visibly longer, and the earliest spring blooms start to appear.
I’ve joked, perhaps a bit meanly (sorry, calendar-year resolution setters) about how much I like the gym on February 1 – it’s much emptier. What that really means is that, for a lot of people, the idea of the gym was exciting, but the reality didn’t work out for them. Lots of people start, not everyone continues.
February comes, and the pressure of starting is off. Reality settles in, and ideas get a lot more tangible. The conversations and agreements that needed to happen for real change to begin… they’re easier, now. Things continue moving.
And that’s why February is my favorite month.