Mid-January. The month that needs intention.

There is something that happens around the third week of January that doesn't get enough attention. The New Year energy — such as it was — has dissipated. The resolutions, if there were any, have mostly been quietly abandoned. The school term is in its established rhythm and there is nothing particularly new happening. This is, according to various psychologists who study the annual mood cycle, the lowest point in the calendar year for adults in the northern hemisphere.

I've been watching this in my own household for several years now. January 14th, roughly speaking, is when the January intentions that were set on January 1st stop feeling real. It's not that anything goes wrong — nothing specific happens. It's that the gap between the person you decided to be on January 1st and the person you actually are on January 14th is wide enough to be visible without being wide enough to be alarming. And that specific size of gap produces a specific kind of low-level deflation.

Children experience a version of this too, though they don't have the cultural context of January 1st resolutions to frame it. What they experience is the third-week fatigue of the new term: the novelty of January has worn off and the term feels long. The weather is at its worst. The light is at its shortest. Everything costs slightly more than it did in September, and there's less novelty energy to fund it.