January light

My kids are back in school after winter break. When we celebrated the Winter Solstice, I told them it would start getting easier to go back to school in the morning. Sam, my ten-year-old, woke up at 6:30 a.m. and said, “Wait, the days are supposed to be getting longer. Where’s the sun? How am I supposed to get up in the dark?”

Rising in the dark does seem like an especially bad idea. January has always been the hardest month for my kids to be excited about school. I suspect it beats out even April as most people's pick for the cruelest month.  It's cold. It's grey. It's thirty-one days.

But the light does change in January. Days are slowly getting longer.

In those moments of darkness, it can take every bit of stamina we’ve got to not despair. The sun is coming. It is strong; it is unstoppable. We just have to hold on, keep on getting up, and finding the light.