January Revisited
January should officially be declared the month of the minimalist. If the queue of cars in the donation line at Goodwill is any indication, I’m not the only one who feels an overwhelming need to rid myself of all things unnecessary. Every year, the shiny trappings of the Christmas season turn on us like that third over-frosted sugar cookie, leaving us aware that no matter how beautiful or delicious, excess has an expiration date. A single candle on an oak library table becomes the stuff that contentment is made of. The over-perfumed spaces that felt welcoming in November and December now seem to be devoid of oxygen. The rare sunny mid-winter day has us scurrying to open windows if only for a few minutes, filling our lungs with air that makes us feel as if we are the first to have ever breathed anything so cold and perfect.
January seems to prompt us to become realists. In a face-off with overflowing closets, we become brutally honest with ourselves. The puffy, lipstick-red vest, the mustard-yellow sweater, the lilac spring jacket – gone. Favorite, thread-bare t-shirts get repurposed with a scissor send-off as they land in the almost depleted dust rag tub. It’s unthinkable that these mementos of the best concerts should ever be worn by anyone else. Better they should continue to exist in an altered state. Realism, after all, has its limits.
January gives us time to ponder the relics that whisper to us from attics and basements. Long-forgotten journals from a different century give us the push we need to document our own days in their most basic form. Somehow, the passage of time can make the most mundane details of our lives shimmer like pearls. Reading old words on now-yellowed pages gives us faith that perhaps one day, someone might stumble across diaries filled with the minutia of our lives and find them worthy of reflection.
January is the bold red stop sign after too many weeks of nothing but green lights. It is absolute permission to dawdle. It is a nudge to wander in whatever spaces bring us comfort. It gives us license to measure productivity by some other means than what we have to show for our days.
January is the book we’ve been wanting to spend time with. It is the craft project for which we’ve put off gathering supplies. It is seed catalogs and bird feeders. It is skeins of yarn and spools of thread in every shade of green. It is sharp pencils and blank canvases. It is sourdough starter and raspberry cordial. It is the gift of time wrapped in unapologetic gray skies and early sunsets that push us indoors where we are free to follow our brightest instincts. January is the antidote to a world that insists we run faster and farther, a world that keeps insisting that we should compare our hardest days to the best days of everyone else.
January gives us 31 opportunities to listen to the callings of our own hearts, and 31 chances to answer with the conviction of our own voices. Clocks and calendars be damned for a little while. These January days belong to the dreamers and inventers. The creatives and the visionaries. They belong to anyone with enough grit and bravado to see these dreary, dismal days for the possibilities they hold. They are freedom to chase everything that inspires and enchants us. They are kindling seeking the spark that is only found in the deepest patches of darkness. They are wonder, captured and suspended, waiting for us to finally arrive.