How are you feeling this wet, windy January?
Today I'm cosied up inside my apartment, hiding from the buffeting winds and horizontal rain outside. It's a warm jumper, comforting soup, and quiet admin sort of day. I felt drawn to write something for the blog, because like January itself, I'm currently in a liminal, in-between state which invites careful thought.
The new year is always a strange time, with encouraging messages of change exploding into every corner of our lives like fireworks. Sometimes, all that inspiration can start to feel like obligation, and it's hard to measure yourself against it all. Is it necessary to change every year?
Perhaps that's the wrong question, because it would be hard to go an entire year without changing even a little bit as a person, even if everything stayed the same on the surface. But I think it might be nice, just once, not to resolve to change. Not to force it.
This year, I'm starting the new year on sabbatical from work, and without a concrete sense of where I might be as the months pass. I can sense the date of my return to work on the near horizon and am regarding it with slight trepidation: how will the bookshop fit back into my life, which has felt so full and busy without it? For me, the last few months of the previous year brought perhaps the most personal change and growth, which I never could have predicted in January.
Looking into the new year, this blank canvas, it seems foolish to set goals, make resolutions, when sometimes transformation takes us thoroughly by surprise.
I do have some quiet, simmering goals however, and the year isn't going to be without its plans: Mr Book Fox and I are getting married, so our celebrations are giving the year some shape and form. I don't know what I'll be doing with myself professionally when the year is out, but I'd like to have made something resembling progress, however my future self will define that in twelve months' time.
My online presence is another source of inspiration for change. I've already started experimenting with a new look on the 'gram, with which I'm tentatively pleased. And I do hope you like the newly upgraded blog! I definitely think it's an improvement and I'm letting myself be a little bit excited about where thebookfox is going.
For now, I think I would describe my outlook on the year as quietly curious. Part of me is thinking that as long as I survive the current maelstrom whipping around my building, I'll call the year a success... Perhaps this lack of new year zeal, of iron-cast resolutions, is part of learning to live more slowly and intentionally. It may not be a goal, per se, but it's a direction of travel, and that's a good start.
Steph
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