I wish I could get under covers and stay there until April. No, until March, until the sap starts running in trees.

There is a winter storm raging outside. For my old performance-oriented self, snow storm was a distraction, an irritant putting in danger my carefully laid plans. For my new self, it is a reminder of who I am in the universe. I am not in control. I am not there to succeed at all cost.

Today we are gathered and see that the cycles of life continue. There are no straight lines, just cycles.

For the first time of my life I feel humble and grateful to be humble.

I don’t remember ever feeling so lost, lonely and disconnected at the start of a working year. I can only list the symptoms, without trying to analyze and understand them. On this first “back to office” day I felt: indifferent, discouraged, misunderstood, frustrated, resigned, “just push through it”, happy to realize it’s 12pm and I can take a break, even more indifferent, detached, “just leave me alone,” “why did I even bother to say anything,” and honestly genuinely scared of the prospect of going to the office tomorrow and facing all the small talk, how are you’s and unmitigated enthusiasm of the people who delude themselves into thinking that the new year somehow means a clean slate. I guess I should add “mean” to my list of symptoms. I don’t know if it’s a burn-out, a midlife crisis, a late-onset neurodivergence (is that even a thing?) or a sign of something darker, deeper and more collective. One thing I do know: I don’t want to ask for help or have to explain myself, but I do want to understand what is eating me and I need someone to get there.

In the past 127 days I’ve experienced

The death of a friend

The death of a black and white cat called Echo

The death of another friend’s nine-year old son in a freakish accident

The death of Israeli teenagers at a music festival

The death of countless Palestinian children

following the death of Israeli teenagers

as if the latter somehow atoned for the former

The death of a Ukrainian poet on the frontlines

of the war that I once had thought would last only a couple of weeks

but now I feel as if it would last forever, until it swallows the every last one of us.

Nothing will ever make any of it right

Nothing will ever atone

So, instead of fighting over who of us hurts the most

Can we sit together in wordless mourning

In an ancient ritual of sadness, love and humanity.

Fresh snow makes everything better. Brighter, lighter, whiter, more bearable. Today, I am grateful for fresh snow like never before. Today, I am grateful for a walk in dimming twilight, for the freshness of crisp air. Today, I was grateful for the privilege to turn off news and social media. To live, for a day, without war.

In the evening, I opened my Facebook feed and learned that the poet Maxim Kryvtsov perished in battle. He was 33. Judging from the photos, he had green eyes and almost unbearably handsome face. I didn’t know who Maxim was, had no idea that his poetry book was voted one of the best Ukrainian books of 2023. I had no idea he lived and now he’s dead and I feel the pain together with many people who loved him and whom I love. I didn’t know his name, but I knew his poetry – it appeared on my Facebook feed from time to time, reposted by friends. His poem about Bucha massacre, God, I must have read it a dozen times and cried every time I read it. Until tonight, I didn’t know who wrote the poem that made me cry. Now the people this poem was written about are gone and now the beautiful man who wrote about them is gone too. And with everyone gone, who will remain?

Today my body asked for rest, so I tried to listen.

It is a quiet day. According to the old calendar, today is Svyat Vechir – Orthodox Christmas Eve. Ukrainians no longer celebrate Christmas in January, but it’s good to remember. Maybe, the day still has some old magic.

I love noticing small things in which my children resemble me. Today, I have noticed my son following the beat of the music during his skating class. The skating rink soundtrack is wholly unremarkable, it is there for background only, but my son was nodding and shimmying while trying to keep steady on his skates. It made me smile and feel that particular tenderness one feels when one sees oneself reproduced in a tiny human being. He notices the soundtrack the way I do and one he does I just can tell it makes everything better and lighter. I wonder if he, when he becomes older, would prefer, like me, the serendipity of an accidental song overheard in a café or on a radio to a carefully curated unsurprising playlist. If he will keep his sound down and his earphones off for a chance to overhear something and get inspired. I hope he does.

It looks like it’s finally really properly snowing. Nine times out of ten the snow starts after dark, as if it wants to take its time to prepare a proper surprise. Or maybe, it just likes to have a few hours to lay quietly, in perfectly even layer, before the dog paws, human feet and car tires mess up the perfection. Maybe, tomorrow the snow will be think enough to sled.

Today, we didn’t change from our pyjamas even when we went for a walk. Just piled the snow suits and jackets and layers of soft cotton and wool on top of the flannel and went outside to check if the little brook in the city park froze over. There were very few people walking. I doubt that the return of the cold scared them, so it must be the return to work that kept them inside. The winter pause is one of those times when I feel acute, tender anticipation of an end, like on vacation and in the last days of August and almost every day in October and even in Spring, when each flower’s season lasts for only a short while. It is always too short, always passes too quickly, always leaves too many memories, even when these memories are only of lazy days and long evenings and mornings when one doesn’t have to rush anywhere. I will never (I hope) understand settler American obsession with DOING something with every free minute. What did you do on weekend? What did you do on a break? This question used to make me anxious. Now I simply reply NOTHING. The point is precisely to do nothing, or not do anything. To stop, slow down, cease, lay back.

So, just for myself, let me list the list of nothings I did today:

fed my children breakfast

made myself a coffee and spent about 45 minutes sipping it and reading Jenny Odell’s Saving Time (finished Chapter 2)

played Dobble and Snakes and Ladders with kids (lost both)

made grilled cheese sandwiches and coleslaw for lunch

went for a walk with Elise (Julien refused and stayed at home) talked about climate change and whether people should have kids at all – I wonder if I am raising an activist or a nihilist and where is the line

came back home to discover Julien asleep on the couch

made hot chocolate for Elise and played chess with her (didn’t exactly loose, but would have lost anyway)

spoke to my mom on FaceTime

did a 5k on a treadmill while kids watched a cartoon

read some more of Moon of the Crusted Snow (it doesn’t get better and I wonder whether I should keep on, skim the rest of the book or abandon it altogether)

hit up dinner and then read to the kids before putting them to bed

also, checked my LinkedIn quite a few times – a gesture that becomes more and more meaningless and annoying.

Overall, well done.

I can’t imagine ever working during the two weeks of Christmas school break ever again. And, to be honest, I don’t feel remotely ready to go back to dusty office carpets and mandatory small talk in three days. I love this pause for many reasons.

Not rushing my children in the morning and giving them freedom to decide their daily activities. Not caring if we do nothing, if the day is not productive or “successful.” I have discovered, to my astonishment, that one can only “waste” time if one approaches it from an extractive perspective. The concept of waste can only exist in opposition to the concept of value. One cannot waste time by breathing, thinking, daydreaming or playing. It is called existence.

Not caring how I look. I have had body image issues for as long as I remember myself. I have a clear memory of my mother’s friend giving me my first diet and exercise plan at the age of seven, but I suspect that people had told me that my body was “wrong” even before that age. Because of the way I’d been taught to hate my body, dressing and styling myself to the point where I remotely like the way I look takes a great amount of energy.

Not caring what people think of me, not caring IF people think of me (most of them don’t and it’s alright). Freeing myself from virtue signaling and the urge to prove that I am right, and getting rid of most social media apps. It’s an uphill battle.

Not spending my daylight hours in front of my computer screen.

This morning I felt gloomy and restless, so I swapped my usual coffee-and-book routine for a walk in the forest. It is only a fifteen minute walk from my home to the forest. In the summer, I go there almost every evening, at least for a quick visit while the sun is setting and my kids are using up their daily screen quota on some silly Netflix show. I should probably be a better mother and get them to walk with me, but the truth is, I quite like walking alone and my children are not eager participants of aimless rambles, so in a way it’s a win-win, even if only in short term. In the winter though the days are short and I rarely have one of two hours of daylight to do as I please. So, today was a gift.

Every time I go to the forest, I remind myself that I should change my approach to wellness and mental health. I should schedule work around wellness and mental health, not the other way around. This time I told myself that I would try to plan one mental health day every two months, choose them well in advance and stick to them no matter what. I think I had a similar idea last March, during another walk in the forest. I ended up working in a crazy rush through spring and then from September to December. I ended up sacrificing myself, not just my wellness days, but my sanity and emotional balance for the work I love. This is the pattern I keep repeating over and over. In my twenties, I used to come to the office on the weekends, stay until midnight, take overnight trains to location visits and survive on a mix of RedBull and Ibuprofen. I was ambitious, driven and most of all I was taught that I, an Eastern European woman, had to work ten times harder to compete against mediocre expats from Western Europe and North America. It took me a long while to realize that I never had a chance in that competition, but the pattern of trying harder, doing more, running myself to the ground just to prove that I am good remained.

This year, although I usually hate new year’s resolutions, I will schedule my life around walks in the forest.

This year was born tired. Even in naive, privileged Canada, the air seems heavy with expectation of the worst. In Ukraine, 200 russian missiles struck overnight, mainly residential areas. I no longer rush to check whether one of these residential areas used to be my home. It is terrifying that Ukraine doesn’t seem like the place that has it the worst anymore.

I am wondering if I am right in trying to protect my children from the news. Should I tell them the truth? Or rather, what truth should I tell them? Whose truth? I tell them I love them. This much I can say for sure.

I have started reading Moon of the Crusted Snow advertised as an Indigenous post-apocalyptic novel – both adjectives appealed to me equally. So far I don’t like it, the writing style is rather dull and characters seem to have been written by an AI, but I am only on the second chapter and trying to give it time.

I had never liked journaling and never made an honest attempt at it, until now. I used to love blogging and was quite successful at it. I love blogging because it is about epiphany, seeing the divine through the lens of every day experiences. This is exactly my writing style and it reflects my expectations of life. I wake up expecting profound revelations, I open a book with a pen in hand – craving to find a prophetic life, I go for a walk expecting a life-changing encounter. I am dramatic, to put it lightly. If I’d lived in the Old Testament times, I’d be one of those mad folks in the desert. I wonder if I was born this way, or if this love of drama was ingrained in me in my pentecostal youth. Anyways, journaling never was my kind of discipline. It is a good reminder that the prophesies and epiphanies are indeed rare, but life keeps happening.

The sun came out for the first time in I-have-no-longer-any-idea-how-many days.

We went for a walk “to say hello to the forest.”

First, we said hello to the trees. Then, we said hello to the geese. It worries me that the geese stayed for winter. How will they survive once the snow finally truly comes and settles? And what about spring? How will we know it’s spring without the long plaintive songs of returning flocks of geese?

At last, we said hello to the forest. It looked naked and shy in this snowless weather.

There were so many people walking. On the way back we passed the construction site, where a few months ago they’d cut trees and destroyed a part of a biking lane to build luxury townhouses. I remember seeing the devastation for the first site, seething with a feeling of loss and helpless rage, calling it to myself terra nullius. Today the construction site was eerily quiet. Are they sleeping, mama? Yes, dear, even capitalism sleeps sometimes.

This is why January 1 is my favourite day. Everything is closed and everyone is walking outside with no other purpose than the walk itself. There are no incoming emails, not even commercial offers. The only day when the capitalism sleeps and I feel myself breathing a little easier.

We came back home, made a hearty meal and played the rest of the day.