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Blue Monday……on reflection

To some of us, Blue Monday is a quintessential dance music track pressed on 12-inch vinyl, recorded by New Order and released when I was a boy. It is one of the greatest memories of going to clubs in my late teens and early twenties. 

For those who don't get that reference, it's the worst day of the domestic calendar, and it just happens to be today.

My birthday was two days ago, but it often falls on Blue Monday or around when people return to work. 

It seemed to always fall on the day that I went back to school, my birthday, but now blue Monday is whatever day is the first proper Monday after the Christmas holidays, and many, many people will be sad or worse today. 

Blue Monday is reported to be the domestic violence spike day in the United Kingdom, when couples separate in the worst possible way after Christmas didn't mend the things they thought it might and after they realise they have no money or love left in their lives.

It's a terrible time to have your birthday, but this year, it may have been one of the best Christmas breaks and birthday times I've had, as I consider where I am on the darkest days in the British calendar.

I will be writing over the next few weeks about my sabbatical time again not to show off or to score points against people, but to encourage people into a different way of living when they have the facility and the possibility to do that and, if they do not have the facility to do that, to encourage people to work towards a situation where they can.

I'm not back at work today (although I actually have a lot of work to do today), but I find myself scheduling my own diary without too many external interruptions and doing the things I want to do.

A quick correction here to let people know that this is the sixth time I've taken the sabbatical time (before Christmas, I thought it was my seventh, but I've counted it up carefully). 

I did the first one of these crazy mental things from 2016 to 2017, and that's when we wrote our first-ever business course and delivered it the same year.

Each year has been something different.

The first time I had a complete and utter digital detox, leaving my phone and laptop at work.

In other years, we designed the practice.

In other years, I've just taken it freestyle to see what happens.

This year, I have several projects to take on a little bit like last year, but it starts with a two-week period where I just don't worry about what I'm eating or, what I'm drinking or what I'm doing before returning back to some form of normality when the kids go back.

This year, the two-week period has been pretty moderate as I've got to that stage in age where I don't feel like overdoing it any more, both in terms of being lazy and in terms of what I've put into my body. So I found myself over the last ten days or so feeling better and better and better and reaching a situation on my birthday weekend where I was better than I had been for over two years.

I was reflecting back on our Christmas period this time and thinking that it was perhaps one of the best Christmas periods we've ever had and probably one of the least complicated and most simple periods we've had, but then I realised that the most important thing about all of this is the reflection backwards.

We're all promising ourselves too much.

We think that we will achieve more things and obtain more things.

We think we will be liked by more people and loved by more than that.

We think the world will fall into place for us, and there will never be a problem.

And so, in the midst of our day-to-day, when anything goes awry, is misplaced, or isn't exactly to plan (particularly at Christmas time), we feel like the world is falling in.

As I've written many times in these pages before, your experiences are not an average of what happens to you; they're an average of the best or worst part and the end part.

And so, as I look back on this blue Monday morning of the average of the best and the end of our Christmas break this year, leading into the start of sabbatical 6.0, it has definitely been the best of times for me due to its simplicity and its ease and its lack of complication. 

I suggest that we all grade our experiences like this: not in the middle, but at the end.

Just get on with the thing that you're supposed to be doing and then think about it later, but do give yourself the time to think about it later, and if it wasn't exactly what you'd expected, then make a note about how it could be better next time and over time these experiences will compound and the blue Mondays will disappear.

I have got exactly what I wanted for the next five weeks. I feel like I'm a millionaire living in a situation where I can do what I like, gain the stimulation that I want, and just have a little bit of space and a little bit of leeway to overcome some of the minor difficulties that life will definitely throw at me.

Happy New Year

Colin Campbell
By Colin Campbell
on 08/01/24 18:00
   

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