In the bleak midwinter

Against productivity

The other day I woke up in the fridge-like conditions of my childhood bedroom. It was dingy, so I dragged myself from the warm cocoon of my duvet and went over to the window to open the blind. I may actually have physically recoiled at the sight of the outside world. The light itself was so cold it practically had sharp edges.

The night before, in the kitchen, we’d encountered a stupefied wasp that had somehow woken itself up from hibernation. The wasp had it right, I thought. Humans, too, should either be sleeping, or awake but stupefied. We are the only species in existence that can look out on this chilly, steel-grey half-light and decide that now is the time to shed our fat, expend our energy, and attain new heights of efficiency and productivity. I went back to bed.

Now that I’m back in London and the holidays are over, I feel a little more ready to begin reinstating some of the habits and routines that have slid in recent weeks. The passive voice doesn’t come naturally to me here: ‘that I have let slide’ is what I feel more inclined to say. But I think this more punitive wording is inaccurate. I paid attention to the solstice this winter for the first time in my life, and in doing so, I came to think of it as something like a pit. The year slides into it, slowly at first but with increasing speed, until by Christmas it has tumbled all the way in and collapsed at the bottom. My wholesome habits and routines—getting up and going to bed at consistent times, morning walks, avoiding alcohol, any kind of exercise—have all slid and collapsed into the pit along with it. I think that’s fine. As the days grow longer and we haul ourselves out the other side, I will gradually set them back on their feet again.

What I cannot abide, however, is the puritanical notion that January should be used to atone for the sins of December. We’ve been at the bottom of a pit! Why should we feel guilty for feasting and relaxing and doing nothing of consequence while we were down there? And so, while I do allow new year’s resolutions, I have a couple of rules about what makes an acceptable one.

One of my rules is that whatever I resolve to do in the new year must enrich my life, not diminish it. I don’t banish; I don’t do penance. This year, I want to fix or have someone else fix all my broken possessions—my good headphones, the lamp I inherited from my grandma, numerous pairs of earrings—so that I can enjoy them again. I also want to spend more time reading books.

My other rule is that I shouldn’t expect any newly-instated behaviours to last beyond January itself. I preclude the otherwise inevitable sense of failure by keeping the stakes low, framing the new behaviour as a ‘challenge’ I’m undertaking out of curiosity, just to see what happens. So in this case, I’m challenging myself to read a book for an hour a day throughout January. Just to see what happens. If I don’t carry on doing so into February, that’s okay.

I hope I do carry on into February, though. A certain urgency is added to the reading challenge, I feel, by the very fact that I can consider it in those terms at all. Once upon a time the challenge would have been to restrict my reading to a mere hour. But fifteen years of regular social media use has been steadily hacking away at my attention span. It’s alarming to me that nowadays, only the most gripping novels can rival the internet in their capacity to catch and hold my attention. It’s not that I’ve stopped reading altogether, but I’m not sure I still qualify as a bookworm. This makes me sad.

I can’t only blame the internet, though. I also read less than I want to because I spend so much of my time writing instead. This doesn’t sound very logical—everyone knows that to be a writer, you must also be a reader. But sometimes, the act of creating feels to me like an addiction. I often find it far more compelling to work feverishly on producing something than to sit quietly and absorb something produced by someone else.

There are three things at the root of this compulsion, I suspect. One is a healthy desire to make things; another is a somewhat less healthy internalisation of the equivalence our culture draws between productivity and personal worth; and the other is my reluctance/inability to drag my eyeballs away from my laptop screen and its magnetic blue light. I’m not certain how these things combine, or in what proportions.

I do know, however, that ‘creativity’ and ‘productivity’ are not interchangeable concepts. One pillar of creativity is output: the actual making of the thing. This is, of course, pretty crucial. Nothing gets created without hours dedicated to putting words on a page, or paint on a canvas, or stitches in a piece of fabric, or whatever it happens to be.

But there is also another pillar: input. Time spent immersing yourself in the creativity of others. Absorbing, observing, letting the well fill. Learning craft by osmosis, steeping yourself in the ideas and preoccupations of other minds.

And there is a third pillar too: listening. This means taking a break from doing in favour of being—going for a walk, meditating, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, taking a nap—so that whatever may have been sparked by the other two pillars gets a chance to compost. You need to leave space in the compost bin for turning and aerating the contents.

I don’t think it’s possible or even necessarily desirable to constantly hold these three pillars in perfect balance, but I for one need regular reminding not to relegate the second two in favour of more quantifiably productive activities. In the run-up to Christmas my life was orientated almost entirely towards output, and while I’m pleased with the results, I think I need to remind myself that the other pillars exist. And January—when every other species in the Northern Hemisphere is hunkering down and preserving energy and not thinking of ‘output’ at all—feels like a very appropriate time to do so. My teetering piles of unread books agree.

---

In other news: if you read last week’s post, in which I introduced my new Substack side-project, you may remember that I was dreaming of seeing a really big starling murmuration. Well, that dream has been fulfilled and then some. I went to visit my mum for a few days and my train arrived just in time for us to drive to a local nature reserve and walk for a bit before dusk fell. As the sky darkened, this happened.

An additional lovely surprise was the video doing numbers on Substack Notes. If you’re one of the people who subscribed off the back of it, hello, welcome and thank you!