I passed a road sign on Monday; sadly, I couldn't get a photograph of it for this blog, but it read, 'This road will be closed from 06/01/25'.
I thought that was so entirely appropriate for Monday or Blue Monday, as it has become known.
I am very familiar with this time of year and what it feels like, particularly because Monday was my birthday, and often my birthday falls on the day that everyone goes back to work.
Almost nobody gives a royal sh*t about my birthday (This is not a poor me blog), but they just can't get up for any sort of celebration or any sort of happiness or any sort of recognition because it's all been done and given away over the past month.
So, how do we pick ourselves up when we hit Blue Monday? When we hit the start of January, the hamster wheel starts to spin and spin and spin again.
Monday is hard when everything starts back, but it doesn't really get any easier, even by Wednesday or even by a week on Wednesday.
I developed little antidotes to these things, little 'happiness boosters', and one of the happiness boosters I've found to be really effective is the notice board.
I developed this in the previous practice when I put a notice board behind my chair in my little office and started adding things of significance to the notice board.
After a while, it started to fill up, and I wondered what to do with it, so I just turned it into a kind of calendar collection.
I have the notice board now that you see associated with this blog behind my chair at work. I fill it up throughout the year, starting with January, and things of significance that are given to me or that I collect, things have to be special to 'make it to the notice board'.
Just before I finish work for my sabbatical time, I carefully take everything off the notice board, look through it, smile, wonder how I possibly packed so much into a year and then carefully store it in an envelope with the year listed in it and pop it in the cabinet in my office.
I now have notice boards from 2020, 21, 22, and 24 popped in there.
I travelled to Scotland this week; in fact, I'm here when I'm preparing this blog, and I was given a birthday card by my brother and sister-in-law.
It's a beautiful little painting, a scene from my hometown on the birthday card.
And so that was it; it was the 7th of January, and I had the first thing for the notice board for 2025.
Instead of wondering how I'm going get through this year and how I'm gonna fit everything in, and how I'm gonna manage through the exhaustion and the disappointment and the distraction and the stress and the challenges and all of those things that will inevitably come throughout the year, instead, I think 'How am I going to fill my notice board?'.
It would be much more fun, much better, something tangible at the other end, if I managed to make it to December 19th.
Blog Post Number - 4046