Are you ready now?
The other morning, my daughter must have sensed something in the air. She turned to me with a sympathetic face and said: Let's make February the new start of the year.
My reaction: sigh of relief, then, I'm in.
Each time another January shows up, it tends to bring a strange heaviness with it, of needing to recuperate from the sum total of the year that’s just come to an end. For me, that first week of the new calendar is riddled with family birthdays and celebrations, beyond the menagerie of holiday events that speckle the second half of December. In my case it also doesn’t help that I possess a lingering mindset from my lawyering days, reminding me that the billable-hour-bank resets to zero when the new year rolls around. Despite a track record of being diligent and hardworking, there’s always a nagging sense that I'm starting out a step behind, off-track, in the hole. January comes in hot, and I just never quite feel ready.
What does “ready” even look like?
I love being organized. I've been known to drool over a garage with labeled shelves. As a kid, I loved reading the Berenstain Bears. And I especially loved reading the “The Berenstain Bears and The Messy Room”. By the end of that book, the Bears had created this beautifully organized wall of boxes replete with spots for everything (puzzles, blocks, crayons). It makes me smile even now as I'm writing this. I've moved beyond the Bears at this point in my life, but I still love clean slates and fresh starts, sharp pencils and new planners, filed-away emails, fully complete to-do lists, a clear-eyed doable plan for the coming months, replete with space for innovation and improvisation. Signals that I'm ready for a new year.
And yet, I have to admit, January has never shown up like that for me, not once.
The enormously prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates once surprised an interviewer by admitting that she never actually felt like she was in the mood to write. “I just start writing,” she said. “Then the mood shows up.”
We often convince ourselves that we require a set of conditions to be in the mood, to be ready. All those wonderfully clean notebooks and sharp pencils, for instance. Or before going on that first run, we have to have all the "right" gear. But the reality is, of course, that conditions are never perfect. All the decks and impediments will never be fully cleared. Someone holding out for an elusive feeling of readiness might never actually get moving.
Sometimes you just gotta go. Dive in. Swim upstream. Pay attention along the way. Celebrate the wins. Do your best to avoid disasters.
And then, every once in a while, persuade yourself that the calendar isn’t telling the truth. Make February the new January – all dressed up and ready to go, with fresh pencils and well-laid plans, as if it’s been waiting for you like the fresh start that it is.
If Joyce Carol Oates had sat around and waited for conditions to be right, she’d never have published a thing. The only “right” condition you need is making the decision to act. Maybe that's what ready looks like.
Welcome to your new year.
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