As I walk around the house in my jeans, having got ready for the day, I take a look around and realize I’ve already gone off the rails.
Got ready for the day?? Got ready for what?
We’ve entered the magical, empty time when it becomes nearly impossible to tell which day of the week it is, the only solid orientation being that the big Superbowl event of Christmas is behind us, and New Years hasn’t happened yet. What day is it? I don’t know. Today.
After being around for 38 of these cycles I’m starting to see how it all works a little more clearly. This is a short post because it’s really more of a wish, that you’re able to sink into Empty Time during the few days of the year when it’s widely available and on offer.
Spinning the clock back by about a month, we can kind of see the brilliance of how we get to this point.
The weather outside gets more frightful, the nights get longer and longer, and everyone starts putting the pedal to the metal for seeing friends and having office parties and going for dinner and buying gifts and wrapping gifts and baking and buying more gifts and wrapping the baking and running and hustling and wondering how the hell it’s already dark because it’s only 4:35 PM and sweating and hustling and wrapping some other stuff… well, things get pretty intense for a little while.
And then all of a sudden, bam. It’s done. Time plays another one of its strange tricks, flashing by this momentous occasion we’ve poured our energy into. And then we realize, ahhh. That was all the preamble. We’ve finally arrived.
Now I know, some of us are still hustling around to distant-cousin gathering #47, and some are hustling kids off to tropical places, and somehow the year turns and it’s back to work and you feel more exhausted than you even were in November.
But in the words of George Costanza, bringing us the miracle of Festivus: As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.
And in this case, the miracle isn’t festivus, it’s Empty Time. It’s death to ambitions, obliteration to to-do lists. It’s leaning into the fact that we can have a lot less going on, and the point of this time of the year is spending time with the people we want to be with (and one of those people may be ourselves)… and that’s all there is to it.
May you lose track of what day it is, may you feel no need to get into jeans or produce a podcast, or tighten your faucet or clean the eaves. It’s Empty Time, it only comes once a year, and it sneaks up on us after that moment with the lights and the cheer.
What day is it? Today.
What time is it? Now.
An excellent reminder that we now have the gift of a window where we can slow down from moving too fast and appreciate where we’ve arrived and how fortunate we are to be in this place.