Traction On The Year

I am trying to get some traction on the year.

Doing vacation at the end of the year this year was confusing to me.  1 day on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 1 day off, 2 days on, 2 days off.  And suddenly the first week of the New Year has flown by.

I was lamenting to Snowflake that this whole chain of events bothered me.  There was not really a sense of being away from work or being with my family, more of a series of weird days off that weren't quite sick days (so I did not feel like I could truly "loaf about" and rest) nor were the truly vacation days (so I did not feel the urge to do something "fun").  The change from old to New Year was especially troublesome as well:  I left work with one set of problems, had a day off, and suddenly it is a New Year and I have the same set of problems.  There was no separation, no sense of having reached the end of something and beginning of something else.

And that, I said to Snowflake, impacted getting my goals out the door.  Because I am almost obsessive about the concepts of endings and beginnings.

I remember in college when I would go away and it would get to be time to move back, I would have a careful ritual where by I would slowly begin the process of packing things up to get ready to go.  My things would go into a smaller and smaller pile and become more and more organized until by the end I had my bed, a change of clothes, and maybe one or two things on the desk for use.  Even in living here before everyone else arrived I found that I reverted to that same behavior:  as the time came to move to the house, the items got more and more compact until there were none.

I like endings.  I like beginnings.  I like the the sense of timing and space that they bring.  That is why I like having a New Year's Day to have new goals for.  There is a sense in which I can say "I am done with the past; here is the future."  But to do this, of course, you need to actually have an ending and a beginning, not just a day sandwiched between two significant events to make the transition.

Christmas, I believe, falls on a Thursday this year, which means that the possibility exists that I can get 12 days of vacation for the cost of 5.  I will make a serious attempt to reserve that vacation for the end of the year:  not just because I need the time off, but because I need the space and sense of ending that such time brings.