The Shortest Day, The Longest Night, & The Returning of Light
Midwinter Reflections on Time, Winter Solstice, and Noticing
“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different.”
There is something about this time of year that always makes time feel a little thinner, as if the veil between moments, between the past and us, has been worn down from use. The drastic dance of bitterly cold temperatures and spring-like days. The light still fades earlier than it should nonetheless.
Our thoughts flutter about like loose scraps of tinsel caught in a strong north wind, mixed in with it come memories, half-formed realizations, and old versions of ourselves that keep drifting back into view.
Time, according to studies into Quantum Mechanics and the Physics of Relativity done by the brilliant minds of people like Einstein, Henri Bergson, David Deutsch and Carlo Rovelli, we now know, that time doesn’t necessarily move forward so much as it folds in on itself, spiraling, and looping. Allowing for these moments that have come to past, and ones yet to come, to brush by one another, barely touching.
We tend to call this the “The End of The Year,” but long before calendars were thought of, before the deadlines attached, our earliest ancestors noticed something else: the light changing.
The Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, is not just a poetic concept or some imagined idea. It’s a measurable, astronomical event that has always been there. The Earth tilts as it always has, and for one long night, the sun reaches its lowest arc in the sky. Then, without much ceremony, the days begin to lengthen again, but just enough to matter.
For early civilizations, this wasn’t simply just symbolism, it was also linked to survival. The solstice marked the moment when the dark no longer deepened. When it became possible, once again, to believe that warmth and growth would return. Noticing this shift was crucial to the survival of crops, animals, and humans.
So people gathered. They lit huge fires. They stayed awake together. Livestock was culled. Offerings and stories were exchanged, feasting, and sharing whatever else could help them through til Winter’s end. Not because they were celebrating abundance, but because they were witnessing their own continuation. Their own survival.
“Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation”
And so begins the tradition of Yule, or at least it was beginning to emerge in records between the 5th and 8th century.
One of the earliest known written mentions of Yule, called Jól by Norse and Germanic peoples, or Giuli by the Anglo-Saxons, comes from an 8th-century British monk, scholar and historian St. Bede the Venerable (c. 672 AD-735 AD).
Often regarded as the ‘Father of English History’. Bede was also an observer of time, seasons and calendars. His work, combined with Dionysius Exiguus, helped divide time into BC (before Christ) and AD (anno domini, ‘the year of the Lord’), as well as being foundational in the standardizing of the Western calendar.
In his treatise De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time), Bede writes that it “derives its name from the day when the sun turns back [and begins] to increase, because one of [these months] precedes [this day], and the other follows.”
In other words, Yule was anchored to the Winter Solstice, to the months of December and January. The knowledge that the darkness had reached its limit. And in a world governed by land, weather and survival, that turning was reason enough to gather, to endure together, and to mark time not by conquest or completion, but by necessity and rhythm.
And it’s no coincidence that over time, Church calendars aligned Christmas near the solstice not to overwrite it, but to speak in a language people understood. The nativity story resonated because it echoed something older and deeply human: hope arriving quietly in the darkest stretch of the year.
Which brings me back to this year.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating endings as moments for notice and started treating them like performance reviews. We measure years by output instead of awareness. We ask whether we did enough, earned enough, changed enough, or accomplished enough. Rarely whether we paid attention to what kept repeating, or what felt misaligned.
At the beginning of this year, I found myself asking a question I suspect many of us ask in private: Does anyone actually know what they’re doing?
It’s one of those questions that can arrive suddenly and then lingers. It shows up in therapy sessions that raise more questions than answers, in late-night spirals, in moments of realization that felt almost inconvenient. When you realize you might already understand more than those that are meant to guide you, the people you’ve hired to counsel you or the ones in charge of things.
That subtle discomfort in discovering that sometimes, the guidance we’re waiting for is already inside us, and hearing it, or taking action, would require too much responsibility.
The truth I kept bumping into was a bit uncomfortable, that much of adulthood is simply improvising disguised as confidence. The more we try to make logical sense of this waking world — the systems, expectations, identities, chasing success, pressure to perform — the more absurd it begins to feel. Not because it’s broken or meaningless per se, but maybe because it was never meant to be simplified and tidy in the first place.
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
So I started small. Simply noticing where my time, attention and thoughts were going. Not to solve anything. Not even to make sense of anything really. Just to notice.
Seven hundred and seventy consecutive pages later, and fifty weeks of time-blocking, what I understand now is this: consistency is not about control, it’s about trust. About learning to enjoy the process. Rhythm teaches what logic cannot.
It’s about showing up daily, even imperfectly, even inconsistently in mood or tone, and even when you don’t know what you’re doing. Because that is what builds momentum. Proof that attention compounds over time, even when clarity doesn’t arrive on a schedule.
There were weeks where I simply didn’t want to. Days and weeks when my mental health felt scattered, when rest was long overdue and progress nearly invisible. And still, over time, it all accumulated. Much like daylight after the solstice. Not obvious, not dramatic, but real.
It isn’t only discipline, and it isn’t only effort. At some point, it becomes about recognizing that the obstacle standing in front of you is no longer external. It’s not time, not lack of talent, nor circumstance.
It’s fear, insecurity, and perfectionism dressed up as preparation.
I wrote often this year about getting out of my own way, about the wall of hesitation. Being insistent that things must be just right before they’re allowed to be completed and seen.
And sometimes it’s more about the small, almost unremarkable acts, our quiet rebellions, our inherited or self-made traditions, the daily rituals we return to without thinking, that remind us why we’re doing any of this in the first place. These moments don’t promise answers or rewards. They offer something much more necessary: continuation.
And maybe that’s the wisdom this season keeps offering us, year after year, whether we listen or not.
The solstice doesn’t demand transformation. And Christmas, in its earliest forms, didn’t promise cozy perfection. They simply marked a turning. A pause. A reminder that these rhythmic cycles exist not to pressure us into becoming something new overnight, or even within a year, but to help us notice what’s already sifting beneath our feet.
Some years don’t change you loudly. They change you slowly, one page, one question, one tiny sliver of light at a time.
And if you find yourself standing in this season, at the end of this year, wondering whether you’ve done enough, accomplished enough, become enough, I’ll leave you with this: if you’re paying attention, if you’re noticing, and if you’re trying, you’re already participating in the oldest rhythm we know and you’re already doing the work. Keep it up!
Merry Christmas and Happiest of New Years!
