Helena Fitzgerald wrote a lovely article in The Atlantic about the week we are currently living in. The lovely week between Christmas and the first full week of January. A week Fitzgerald lovingly calls "Dead Week."

Please enjoy her words ...

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Dead Week isn’t a week off for everyone, or at least the thing it is a week off from isn’t work. Rather, it is a week off from the forward-motion drive of the rest of the year. It is a time against ambition and against striving. Whatever we hoped to finish is either finished or it’s not going to happen this week, and all our successes and failures from the previous year are already tallied up. It’s too late for everything; Dead Week is the luxurious relief of giving up.

These five days are the purest unit of nothing time that the year offers. Nothing time is different from free time; Dead Week is not a vacation and not a holiday, but we are afforded so little truly unmarked and nonurgent time that five days when nothing really matters can feel like something more precious than either one. In American society, we spend most of the year receiving the message that we are supposed to try harder, do better, achieve more than the person next to us, rack up a bigger pile of stuff and a longer list of accomplishments. For once, the insistent push to hustle and climb grows quiet, and there is a break from the screeching sense that every day must be optimized for efficiency.

My favorite part of Dead Week is getting up early, drinking coffee, and looking ahead to the long stretch of nothingness that fills the day. The nothingness doesn’t have to be slothful; sometimes I leave the house and sometimes I don’t, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. If I don’t go outside, I don’t feel bad about it, and if I do, everybody else I encounter looks equally confused and at loose ends, frittering away these leftover days. It is the only time of year when the days feel slow to me, when the time outside of whatever tasks I have to do does not somehow vanish into further worry and busyness. It is the only time I don’t feel like I am perpetually late to my own life, and that easing of guilt offers a deeper rest than any vacation would.

Dead Week is forgiving—everyone loses track of time; everyone forgets; everyone decides not to worry about it until January. These days at the end of the year offer a kind of grace, a time when simply existing is enough, outside the records of success and failure.

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash