Today, 5th January, is Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve. While I was working in Germany and Switzerland, I began to see the wisdom of taking a break from work and the normal routines of the household not just for Christmas Day and Boxing Day as we tend to do in England, but for the full twelve days of Christmas until after the Epiphany. 

It’s the darkest part of the year. Dawn is late, sunset is early so it’s hard to push yourself out of bed in the dark and travel back in the dark. It’s much better to accept that nature is telling you to hibernate. 

Since Christmas Eve, I’ve been doing what I can to hold the real world at bay. I no longer navigated by whether today was Monday or Wednesday but by whether or not it was Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve or Epiphany, 

I’ve tried to make it a time of calm when I can do nothing except enjoy my wife’s company, A space where I can reflect on how I’m living my life and what I want from it without having to move from reflection to action planning. 

I’m retired now. I’ll be sixty-seven this month. You’d think that would mean I have a lot of time to do all those things I used to be too busy to do. And yet, I know that large chunks of 2024 will be eaten up by doing things that are necessary but tedious: selling a house, buying a house, dealing with health problems (mine and other people’s), sorting out finances and taxes and an endless cycle of household chores.

All of those things (apart from the household chores which are as relentless as rust) are on hold until Monday 8th January when my Winter Solstice hiatus ends.

So, today I’ve been thinking about the kind of life I want. About how I should spend time when it’s not being eaten by the necessary but fed by the longed-for.

I’m not a Bucket List person. I have no boxes I need to tick to feel fulfilled, I feel no need for hobbies to fill the void where work used to be. It turns out that what I long for most is the peace that comes from being where I want to be with the person I want to be with and doing whatever I want to do, even if that means doing nothing at all. I want to be at home with my wife. I want us to follow our curiosity and creativity to wherever it takes us. I want us to share the things that please us as well as the things that worry or annoy us. 

I want… well I struggled to find the words for the rest of that sentence, so I looked for a poem that would say it for me and I found ‘Serenity Prayer‘ by Brian Bilston It’s a pretty good description of the kind of days I long for. Here it is: