WHY DOES JANUARY EVEN EXIST?

Three of us braved the icy, snow crusted roads this morning to come into the office. I had no choice. I have service people in town right now to do preventative maintenance of some of our very most popular microscopy systems. Rescheduling would be a difficult option for all concerned. But honestly, I probably would have made the treacherous drive here any way because I have become the First Law of Motion. The act of getting ready to go in to work is the applied force this ball needs to start moving.

And this ball really needs to start moving.

But that’s the thing with January. It is the first month of the year and should feel like a month of possibilities and fresh starts. The reality is that the month of January is my old 1976 Buick Skylark that took three to twenty turns of the key to get the engine started. This is where you decided if you are a ‘glass half full’ or a ‘glass half empty’ kind of person. If you lean towards the half empty way of thinking, you might think that January is here to ruin all of your plans. Michael attempted to make reservations for my birthday dinner in two weeks and there was zero availability at my first two choices. That weekend kicks off Kansas City Restaurant Week and there is the potential for an important Chiefs football game on that day. When Michael asked me for another option, I said “just forget it.” Then four to six inches of snow got dumped on the city and there’s more coming on Friday, canceling plans I had made for my mother and sister to visit so we could celebrate my mom’s birthday. So it really feels like January is looking at me and saying “Hey…I get that you want to do things. I really do, but nope.”

January. Wrecking plans since 1976. Or 2012 (if I’m being generous).

The month of January is named after the Roman god, Janus, the god of new beginnings and transitions. Janus is not the god of good new beginnings or bad new beginnings. He is the god of just new beginnings and new beginnings of any kind requires some transitioning. Back in 2012, I did not see January as a month of new beginnings. It was a month of painful slogging tasks. It was a time of conditioning for a transition into a new beginning that was most definitely not a good new beginning. All Januarys since have been compared to this and treated with an expectation that January is going to be hard as fuck. But I so desperately want to see January with ‘glass half full’ eyes, so here goes.

What would a ‘glass half full’ person think about January’s shenanigans?

January is your therapist telling you that all those things that you want to do requires you to put in some work to do them. There’s no waking up to written manuscripts or finished marathons. Goals are not met by happenstance. You have to put in the work, but January is also forcing you to focus only on the things you can control. It’s going to throw all these obstacles or tests out there that you have no control over to train you both mentally and physically to focus on the things you can control. To a ‘half glass empty’ person, this looks like the bare minimum of activity, but ‘glass half full’ people know that looks are deceiving. The hardest pose in yoga looks like you’re doing nothing while doing nothing, but this doing nothing time allows for molecular level recovery for our bodies.

I can’t control the snow, but I am able bodied enough to shovel my driveway and dig my car out. I made it to work, but did concede to canceling my yoga class this evening (safety first). Plans are not ruined; they have just been rearranged to different dates and venues. Everything could be so much worse right now. January could be really making me do much harder things this year than just navigating snowy terrain and cold weather. Maybe I should give the month of January a new slogan.

January, the month that is the kick-you-in-the-ass trainer you didn’t know you needed.