Hey, I’m just checking-in. Are you ok? Yeah, where did it go? The year, I mean. 2025. It’s almost done. What a year, and I don’t mean it in a “hey, didn’t we do well?” kinda way. I mean, in more of a “jeez, have you seen what’s happened?” kinda way. I never thought it’d turn out like this! But what can you do, other than keep keepin’ on?

Christmas is upon us. The New Year beckons, and I think we’re collectively peeping at 2026 wondering just what could happen next? Alright, look. We’re in it now. The whole world’s pitched forward into this frantic, glittery, year-end sprint. And everyone’s yelling, through ads, through lights, through every device in your damn house, that you gotta be out there. Buying, celebrating, performing a version of joy that feels like it was manufactured in a lab that also makes those too-tight holiday sweaters.

But here’s the thing the screaming doesn’t tell you: the planet itself is basically hitting the snooze button. It’s dark at 4:30. The trees are just skeletons holding up the grey sky. There’s a physical, rhythmic logic to that, you know? A permission slip written in frost on the window. It’s not saying “go,” it’s saying “whoa.” So maybe, just maybe, the real rebellious act, the truly counter-cultural move this time of year, isn’t another party. It’s pulling the plug on the expectation machine for a minute. It’s travelling inwards. Checking the internal weather report. Stoking your own furnace with a decent meal, some quiet, a little less doom-scrolling and a little more just… staring at the wall. It’s not hibernation, it’s recalibration. You don’t have to earn the right to just be a living creature for a bit. Winter’s basically whispering, “Hey, knucklehead. The garden’s under the snow for a reason. What’s under your snow?” Sit with that. The rest of it will still be there, blinking furiously, when you get back.

Alright, so you’ve sat with it. You’ve stared at the wall, you’ve listened to the quiet, maybe you’ve even gotten weirdly attuned to the specific sound your radiator makes. Good. Now, in that quiet, after the panic-baking and the familial detente and the weird existential dread that comes with the turning of the year, something else starts to poke through. A little thought. A “what if.”

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about some manic, January 1st “NEW YOU” resolution bullshit. Those are doomed. They’re born in the fluorescent glare of guilt and a hangover. This is different. This is the low, slow, latent energy of winter itself. Everything outside is dormant, but dormancy isn’t death: it’s a gathering. The roots are doing something down there in the dark you can’t see. That’s the vibe. The entire atmosphere is practically begging you to be internal, to be incubational. So that little “what if” you have, that flicker about learning the bass line to that one song, or writing down the story about your weird uncle, or finally figuring out how watercolor works, this is the perfect time to just… lay it out on the mental workbench. Don’t build it yet. Just look at the pieces.

Because here’s the gift of this grim, grey stretch: there’s no pressure to produce. The world expects nothing from you right now except maybe to shovel your path. So you can be terrible in private. You can sketch a horrible cartoon, write three bad sentences, record a voice memo of a half-baked idea that goes nowhere. It’s all compost. It’s all roots in the dark. By the time the sun comes back and the world starts yelling about productivity again, you might have something quietly, stubbornly alive down there in the dirt. Not a resolution. A germ. Something that, by 2026, might just be ready to break ground because you gave it the one thing it needed: the undemanding, forgiving dark to figure itself out.

Listen, I get it. We’re all basically biological clocks wrapped in anxiety and denim. And for eleven months of the year, we let the world wind us. The alarm, the commute, the deadlines, the “did you see that email?” It’s all external percussion, and we’re just trying to keep the beat. But then December hits, especially this weird week between the chaos and the new year: it’s like the metronome breaks. The rhythm section takes a smoke break.

And in that strange, suspended silence, you can finally hear your own damn tempo. It’s not the frenetic, caffeinated 180 BPM of October. It’s slower. It’s a 3/4 waltz maybe, or just a slow, steady thump you forgot was there. Winter isn’t about stopping time; it’s about revealing your own personal time. That low-grade exhaustion you’re feeling at 4 p.m.? That’s not a moral failing. That’s your inner squirrel saying, “Hey, it’s dark. We should be thinking about soup and blankets, not spreadsheets.” The desire to just sit? That’s not laziness. That’s the rhythm of restoration. The earth is tilted away from the sun, for God’s sake. It’s the annual permission to be a little more sedimentary.

Trying to fight it, to burn through this season with the same manic energy as July, is like trying to mosh at a folk concert. You’re just gonna hurt yourself and annoy everyone. The trick is to listen. Is your rhythm telling you to sleep an extra hour? To walk without a podcast blasting your brain? To just… potter? That’s not wasted time. That’s the most productive thing you can do right now—tuning the instrument. Getting back in sync with the fundamental, animal pulse that runs underneath all the noise. Come February, when the light starts to creep back, you won’t be running on fumes and obligation. You’ll be moving from a place that actually feels like your own.

Yeah, see, this is where I diverge from the whole “vision board” crowd. That’s for people who have it together enough to have magazines and scissors in the same place. My annual planning, it’s less of a boardroom strategy session and more like… a feral animal mapping its territory in the off-season. That dead week, this post-holiday lull? It’s perfect for it. It’s the one time of year the inbox chills out, the phone stops vibrating with urgency, and you’re left alone in the quiet with the raw, unformed shape of the next twelve months.

So I get out the notebook. Always a notebook. Something about the white paper and lack of printed lines feels unofficial, non-binding. And I just start sketching the landscape. Not goals—I hate that word, it sounds like something you’d shout at a sales team. More like… curiosities. What’s the itch I didn’t scratch this year? What’s the conversation I kept having with myself in the car that never went anywhere? I write it all down. The half-baked podcast idea, the nagging feeling I should understand basic plumbing, the name of that author someone mentioned. It’s not a to-do list. It’s an archaeological dig in my own brain. I’m plotting points on a map where the ground feels soft, where something might be buried.

And the beautiful, low-stakes genius of doing it now is that it’s all hypothetical. Nobody’s asking for deliverables. So I can connect these weird dots without consequence. What if that plumbing thing led to fixing the dripping sink, and what if fixing the sink made the kitchen less annoying, and what if a less annoying kitchen meant I cooked more, and… you see? It’s a chain reaction of potential. I’m not committing to being a master plumber. I’m just tracing a possible thread in the dark. By the time real spring hits, and the world demands action, I’m not starting from a blank page in a panic. I’ve got this weird, coffee-stained map of my own interior. Some of the paths will be dead ends. Most of them, probably. But a couple might just lead somewhere interesting. The plan isn’t to follow it perfectly. The plan is to have a plan to deviate from.

So grab that notebook, get some coffee, or tea, or whatever beverage is appropriate, ignore the phone or any flickering screen, and just map it out. The map is never the territory, so just loosely map it all out and when we return in 2026, at least you’ve got something of a map to follow, and who knows where that’ll lead you?

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Normally, in this section, I give you a couple of reasons why you might want to subscibe to this blog. This time, I won’t, but the box is there anyway. Take care of yourself.