How can you let a solstice slip past without noticing it? Admittedly, it’s sometimes easy to do in summer, but for the winter solstice it’s more serious. Ironically for me, the issue is that I’m still a jogger. When you start your work day early, and you try to jog before work, the shortness of the day works against you. Even if you prefer the after-work jog, December and January give you that perpetual feeling that you’re running out of time. Each year around about now I look at charts. Some organizations helpfully publish sunrise and sunset charts free on the internet. I trace them to see when there will be enough light to jog in the morning. Because of the offset between latest sunrise and earliest sunset, the evenings have been getting microscopically longer for a couple weeks now. Sunrises, however, are still coming later. They’ll continue to do so until about mid-January.
For those of us who parse out our days into minutes, trying to feed the beast that requires our utter devotion, finding time to jog can be difficult. It’s dark after work, and besides, I’m exhausted and hungry by then and need to start on supper. Morning’s an easier thing to control. With pagan fervor I await the lengthening days. Particularly the early mornings, which I crave to be earlier again. So we light a Yule log and pray for the best. Not that it ever changes sunrise times. Around here there’ve been a couple of epic December rainstorms and cloudy days push available light back even further. With the sun technically risen, it can still be dark. There’s a metaphor here, dear reader.
Winters are for reflection. Unless we’re busy cramming each day full of seasonal festivities, we spend a lot of time indoors with our thoughts. That’s one of the reasons I jog. It clears my head. It’s the reboot that comes after the reboot of a night’s rest. I’ve generally been awake for hours before sunrise. These little thoughts I share with you daily are courtesy of those quiet moments in the dark. A winter is wasted if we don’t use it for reflection. Employers should be more generous with their December holidays. It’s in sync with nature, which is more in keeping with being human than “business,” or “busyness” is. Today is the winter solstice. Around sunset we will light some candles of hope. And we know that even if we can’t really tell, tomorrow will have a bit more light than today.
