Thursday has crept around and here I am the morning of pulling together a newsletter I haven’t yet written. It’s not because it’s arduous or feels like a chore. I love writing and starting this Substack is one of my proudest achievements. Despite it feeling like a lifetime ago, a mere three weeks ago in mid-December, I was done. I had no words left to give. The battle between willing my mind to think, my hands to type and the desire to keep Substack alive was a fraught one. Lethargy won in the end. What I needed was rest, mindlessness and to luxuriate in the complete loss of sense of time and responsibility that the period between Christmas and New Year brings.
I have spent the last week or so leaning into the slow stillness of January. January can often feel like something we have to endure. Something to get through, pleading it to end wishing time away to reach February and get ever closer to Spring. This kind of resistance usually invokes the opposite of our desires by magically making time slow down and January lasts for six months instead of one. Or perhaps the opposite is true, where January becomes a beacon of light for all our hopes, dreams and unrealistic expectations. Harsh goals we’ve set ourselves with strict criteria for success. Resolutions becoming our driving force yet our inevitable downfall in setting ourselves up for failure. I am hereby rejecting both the pressure and displeasure for January and I’m making the most of it.
Earlier this week, I read Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor on Noema Mag written two years ago when Dacher Keltner’s book Awe was released. Keltner argues for a new field of psychology wherein seeking “brief moments of awe is as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.” It felt like a timely read, aligned with how I want to move through January.
If you are willing, you can coax awe into your life quite easily. At times when my mind isn’t racing, overwhelmed with thoughts I can’t control or whizzing with anxiety, I see beauty in the mundanity of the every day with clarity. I look at bird formations in the sky with fascination. I walk along paths underneath the branches of dense leafless trees with my head tilted towards the sky. The other day I saw the biggest pine cones on a tree I have ever seen and my mouth actually dropped in wonder. Awe is a humbling emotion, one that makes us swell with gratitude and ground us.
In a creative sense, I believe there is a correlation between awe and boredom. More recently I’ve seen talk about cultivating boredom and inviting it in with open arms.
knows that boredom is essential to the creative process. A component that allows our thoughts and originality to have innovation. For our work to be the very best it can be. It was during bouts of boredom, wandering alone and dreaming, that Daley-Ward would ‘watch how the earth bloomed in Spring and early Summer, notice the carpet of green underfoot, and marvel at the edge of the land against the sky.’ All of which informed her writing by solidifying her understanding of the world around her.Similarly,
’s wrote that to fix a waning attention span, you might just have to be bored. She cites a tweet from Emma Weaver sharing her struggles with her memory and her desire to read but her inability to focus on the page prevents her from doing so. Responses to the tweet blamed her phone. But Lindsay believes the phone itself isn’t the issue. Rather there is a need to unlearn the need for constant stimulation from phone-based behaviours, thus allowing yourself to be bored to get stuff done.So, yes, January might be boring. Good. I want to be bored right now. I can’t face another time screen alert on my phone that makes me gasp in horror. I want to feel the cold chill of winter on my face. I want to glimpse birds that make me appreciate the diversity of nature and all its species. I want to see huge fuck-off pine cones that cast a gravitational pull on me to go and investigate.
After the intensity of social engagements and the pressures of December, I am embracing as opposed to enduring, the solitude of January and all the gifts of awe it brings.