The Solstice Can’t Come Soon Enough
The best day of the year is coming up fast.
That’s the winter solstice — December 21 — the best day of the year, because from here on (for the next six months) the total hours of daylight start increasing each day.
And up here in the great white North, that’s something we really look forward to, especially after a year of pandemic and seemingly relentless natural disasters.
It’s not just more daylight that I’m looking forward to. One of the best things about being self-employed is that I have a lot of control over my boss’s decisions regarding when I can book time off work. Round about the winter solstice every year, I wrap up until January. Happily, most of my clients seem to do the same.
With the pandemic, there hasn’t seemed like much reason to take time off work in the last two years. Travelling is a conglomeration of frightening exposures and ever-changing bureaucratic hurdles, and most of the cultural events I’d normally enjoy have shifted to safer online delivery.
As Adam Grant wrote in the New York Times, languishing in the blahs has been the dominant emotion of 2021. And so with the solstice in sight, rebellion has struck, and I’m calling a holiday break from all the stagnation and emptiness.
