Meanwhile..."Two weeks in. Thoughts"?

Somewhere around the two-week mark, January starts to itch. The pristine list of resolutions is still magnet-fast on the door of our fridge, exactly as we wrote it. The intentions are still there, yet you perhaps suspect that enthusisam might be trying to call a cab. New Year confidence - "this time will be different" - has been replaced by something more familiar: realism.

This is the turnback point - when going home to get your phone is more of a pain than going shopping without it. Where we begin to wonder whether we should push through, have a "by-myself" strategy meeting, or just pretend the whole thing never happened.

It's an awkward place, mid-January. It seems way too soon to call anything "quits", but long enough for "good effort" to get a seat at the winners table. We tend to value outcomes more when significant work has been put in, even if the outcome isn't (objectively) very successful. This minor paradox is rooted in what behavioural study folks call "congnitive dissonance theory" - which is the discomfort we feel when effort and outcome don’t align, and we choose to ease that feeling, by changing the story rather than the facts.

We don't want all that effort to feel "wasted" - so we re-interpret the experience as "gosh, that was meaningful." We attach value to the whole thing anyway - win or lose. It is cleverly designed by ego, to make any lack of completion feel less like a personal "whoopsy-daisy" and more like a story of valiant effort.

So half-way up the January hill, if we try hard, we don't have to choose to feel bad for not having stayed the course. We don't have to speak unkindly to ourselves about why everyone else is so much better at this, or that our will power has wilted in the wine aisle.

Perhaps this time of the month is not asking how committed we are, it might be questioning how realistic we were to begin with. It's like the Harry Potter Sorting Hat - revealing what amongst our New Years Eve resolution list, was chosen thoughtfully - and what was more...aspirationally ideal. No doubt fuelled by a surge of classic, champagne energy that rarely shakes hands with real life.

But let us not see that as a moral or personal failure. Let's be kinder than that.. We shall all see it, dear Readers, as nothing more than "information". No sense of either giving up, or doubling down. However... there is a third option available to us. The chance to adjust. To ask whether the change we are trying to make is supportive or plain old demanding. Not all resistance is laziness.. sometimes it's feedback.

When we knock over a hurdle, in the - "no more chocolate éclairs" - hundred yard dash of January, what stumbles is not our commitment, but the way we’ve framed the change. We set out to change the oil on absolutely everything, when what we actually needed was a small, livable shift. We aimed for wholesale transformation, when what would have been more bitesized, would have been consistency. Or rest. Or a tad more honesty about where we’re starting from.

OK.. I know what you are thinking. Mid-January has very little patience for grand narratives. It’s not interested in who we plan to become by year end. It’s concerned with what we can live with now - in the middle of rainy days, imperfect moods, and lives that can't always pause to accommodate over-arduous, zesty, fresh starts.

Mid this month, is also the moment when self-criticism can choose to sneak in, cunningly disguised as motivation. The belief that if we were just better, more disciplined, more together, this wouldn’t be happening. But "I'm not good enough" has never been particularly good at creating meaningful change. It mostly just adds another rock to an already heavy bag.

A kinder approach might be to treat this January mid-point not as a reckoning, but as a review - a sort of "What is this teaching me? moment. What felt good in theory, but proved very awkward in practice? What felt like a performace?

Quieter questions don’t make for dramatic declarations. But they do tend to lead to changes that last longer than mid-January. Perhaps the real work of this month isn’t about staying the course or giving up old habits. Perhaps it’s about noticing what happens when intention meets reality — and allowing ourselves to respond with a little more flexibility, and a lot less judgement. Two weeks in, the bloom might have fallen from the rose. But clarity has a way of showing up in its place, with an equally alluring scent.

And that’s not nothing.