no need to sparkle

I both love and fear a new year, just as I love and fear the blank page

January brings so much clamour. The online world is filled with resolutions, intentions, assertions and lists — it’s hard to stay focussed amongst the noise. I both love and fear a new year, just as I love and fear the blank page — the pressure and the possibility — a clean sheet of paper, an empty screen with the cursor blinking. I began this year with a swim in the sea pool. Searing clarity of cold water shed the dust of the old year and made me anew, chilling my flesh and clearing my head.

Now, I sit at my desk in my loft room study, an empty, quiet morning ahead of me for the first time in weeks. Outside my little window, it’s raining — droplets slide down the glass pane. Thin, skeletal branches of the beech tree opposite sway in the wind, its resident crows calling through the damp air. I listen to the wind, and the slowing patter of the raindrops. In this moment of stillness and pause, I remind myself, as I do most years, of Woolf’s words: ‘No need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself.’ One day at a time, one word at a time — it is enough, we are enough.

The page is no longer blank, because I am writing to you.

Thank you for reading, your support means the world to me.

I hope the new year brings you all good things,

Laura x

PS: I’ve started using the Morning Pages app again. I’ve found it to be the next best thing to a swim for clearing my head.