A Quick Hello

Some thoughts on winter and resolutions

This month has already started off pretty wild. I got to go to New Orleans for such a beautiful wedding where I was able to reconnect with some of my favorite people. On the way back I got covid and was aimlessly wandering my apartment hoping that I could somehow get the fuck out and be done with the fever and delirium. It’s an understatement to say this is the least of it, but this is all I’lll share for now. 

After those weeks of traveling, drunk, fatigued, sick, overwhelmed and in peace, I’m just tired. I wake up in the mornings and try to write, but I’d rather sleep. It seems like every other day I get up and hear the rain in the alley by my window and the hiss of car tires down the street and all I can do is listen to it go. It’s not cold here—not even close to the cold that keeps people in in the Midwest, or the ice storms in Oregon recently, but still the unreasonably pleasant rain that is winter in the Bay Area is keeping me in. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to write and I definitely don't want to be productive. But writing this is a fun practice. So here I am.

Even though it’s not cold here, it still is winter, and we can feel it. The cool air is a reminder to stay in—some sort of inherent desire to hold onto my energy appears. I lay in bed for so long. It feels like hibernation. Maybe it is. But it’s the new year. I should be doing so much.

People, or more generally the media at large, are saying to get a move on with our resolutions. And while I love resolutions, these days I’m thinking more and more how odd it is that we decided to do them in the winter, and not the spring. If you live anywhere east of the Rockies, most everything is dead and frigid and seemingly lifeless. Temperatures in some places are twenty below Fahrenheit. It’s time to be quiet, to stop the incessant doing and be inside and wait excitedly for buds and spring ephemeral flowers. 

But some people say that we should be more productive in the winter because there are less outside distractions, far fewer moments to be spent with friends. Instead some people seem to say this is the moment to go harder, to do more. But why? All that just sounds like some capitalistically minded delusion to not follow our bodies intuition that tells us to slow down, save our energy, wait for spring, the way every other animal wants to do. Most other species, even along the equator, follow the way of the sun. When the majority of us tended to lands we did the same. We had to stay in and wait out the winter. There was less food. And to think that those cycles in some way are not a part of us seems to place ourselves too far away from the world where we live in day to day. What makes us so special ato think we don’t on some level follow those natural rhythms?

I’m always slow in January and February. I don't want to do anything, not even write really. I just want to lounge, eat soup, and sleep. Maybe I'm just justifying my laziness, but I don’t think so. I’m only just coming to terms with how good it feels in the winter to stay in, be quiet, and do as little as necessary.