January is Not The Time to Change
Every January, we’re told to begin again.
New year. New you. New habits. New discipline. New body. New resolve. The calendar flips, the champagne goes flat, and suddenly we’re expected to surge forward, energized and ambitious, in the coldest, darkest stretch of the year.
And if it feels wrong in your body, well… that’s apparently a personal failure.
But here’s the thing we forget: for most of human history, January was never meant to be a beginning at all.
The year didn’t start in the dead of winter. It began when the earth did. When light returned. When shoots pushed up through soil. When bodies warmed, animals stirred, and people remembered that they were alive. Spring was birth. Summer was fullness. Autumn was wisdom. Winter was rest, reflection, and preparation for letting go.
Winter was never about reinvention. It was about rest and survival.
Long before planners and productivity gurus, people understood that this season belonged to the inward turn. To stew and sleep. To touch and warmth. To telling stories, tending the fire, honoring the dead, and staying the course until light returned.
Then calendars got involved.
January, as a “new year,” is a bureaucratic compromise. A line drawn not by the body or the land, but by emperors, astronomers, and eventually popes who needed everyone to agree on dates for taxes, trade, and control. It stuck, not because it made sense, but because enough powerful people insisted on it long enough.
And here we are, centuries later, still pretending this is a natural moment for transformation.
I see what that pressure does to men. We feel it ourselves. The guilt of not wanting to hustle harder in January. The quiet shame of craving rest instead of resolutions. The sense that something is wrong with us because our bodies don’t want to sprint when the world is cold and dim.
Your body isn’t broken. It’s simply telling the truth.
Winter asks for gentleness. For patience. For staying close to what sustains you. It asks you to take stock, not charge ahead. To notice what carried you through the last year, what no longer fits, and what might be ready to release when the time is right.
This doesn’t mean reflection has no place now. It just means reflection isn’t the same as punishment.
We don’t need to attack ourselves with resolutions made in low light and thinner spirits. We don’t need to declare war on our bodies in January. What we need is to listen. To tend. To conserve. To remember that rest is not failure and slowness is not laziness.
There is one thing January gets right, and it comes from an old Roman god named Janus. He was the guardian of doorways and thresholds, depicted with two faces: one looking back, one looking forward. Not rushing. Just witnessing. Standing in the in-between.
That part, we can keep.
January doesn’t have to be a starting gun. It can be a doorway. A pause. A moment to look honestly at where you’ve been and gently consider where you might go, when the light returns and your body says yes.
So if you’re not ready to reinvent yourself right now, you’re not behind.
You’re human.
Happy New Year… in the quiet, winter sense of the words.
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