It's OK To Go Slow

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

Rumi

How was your January? Mine was pretty stagnant, to be honest. Hardly the all guns blazing entry into the new year we traditionally revere.

At times, I berated myself for this lackluster start. Questioned whether inspiration and energy would ever return.

At other moments, feeling a touch wiser, I questioned the madness of putting pressure on ourselves to show up with fire in our bellies during what is, for many of us, the trickiest month of the year. With the pre-Christmas sparkle and the quiet, peaceful days of late December gone, and spring still a distant dream, January, for me, has always had a hollow dreariness.

Interestingly, the tradition of new year’s resolutions, started by the Babylonians around 2000BC, originally took place at the spring equinox, when the new year was celebrated. It was only some 2000 years later, when we shifted to the Julian calendar, that January 1st marked the start of the new year and the setting of resolutions.

Yet in many places in the northern hemisphere, the world is at its coldest and darkest in January. Nature is still in hibernation. It feels less an apt time for new beginnings, and more one to go slow, take enough rest and replenish ourselves.

Over the last weekend of January, I got a chance to do just that. My husband took our son to visit family in Derbyshire, and I stayed in London. In the past, I’ve cherished these rare solo weekends as an opportunity to immerse myself in city life, cramming in as many of the things I love as possible: afternoon tea, a visit to a spa, wandering round Soho’s backstreets, and so on. This time, my instinct was to retreat from the blustery January city. I spent most of my time alone at home, reading, watching movies, journalling, and eating delicious food (see below for some of my recommendations). It was bliss, and just what I needed to recharge.

Hot on the heels of that weekend, came Imbolc, the Celtic festival, celebrated on February 1st and 2nd, which marks the first whispers of spring. I noticed how the days were now that bit longer, how the snowdrops were starting to burst through the winter soil. And I sensed how my own energy and enthusiasm had started to return.

Whenever I’m caught in one of life’s less flourishing cycles, it’s all too easy to convince myself that I’ll stay stuck there. But if there’s one lesson life seems to throw at me again and again, it’s that this is the way it is, and it’s meant to be: fallow times and fertile times; ones that feel empty, and ones that feel full and juicy. None of which last forever. And the thing is to learn to lean into and to trust this ebb and flow, as both are necessary, one balancing out and creating a pathway to the other.