They say that to err is human, but to persist is diabolical. If that’s the case, then I must be the devil himself.

April has been grossly underwhelming; I had little motivation, energy, and found myself in a persistent state of low-level anxiety.

Unfortunately, this has dramatically impacted my ability to mentally organize my things. For example, I usually follow a seasonal schedule where I reevaluate the previous three months at the end of each quarter to see what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next quarter. It’s kinda like having a “new year” every 12 weeks.

This damn month. It went fast. It went weird. It went backward but also kinda forward. So it went technically sideways, in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of “something went wrong or didn’t go as planned,” but also in the more precise feeling that I don’t know if I made any progress on anything or not.

With a quick statistical exploration of my diary, “kitchen” was the third most used word, followed only by “things” and “do.” I don’t need GPT-4. Even this stupidly simple stat nails the two main issues this month: finding it very hard to do anything and fighting with my damn kitchen.

There is a little trick I find helpful to get unstuck. Take the one thing you would like to do. Take the smallest related activity that you would consider a goal. Divide that effort by ten.

I wanted to actively come back to fiction writing for a long time, but I never managed to get myself to do anything in that regard. So this month, I followed my own advice and asked myself to write for 30 minutes three days a week. It is really nothing. But it worked, and I wrote the first 2000 words of fiction in a long time. Not much, but still 2000 more words than in the previous 13 months. And even if I continue with this laughable average, I will still have a complete novel in 1 year. Not bad for “getting unstuck.”

The first month of the year is always a month of change. However, the mistake is to make it a month of drastic change. First, for once, the months start with the New Year’s Eve celebrations hangover, so we are already set up for failure. Second, drastic changes are doomed to failure anyway, so we should not put all our hopes on the line with bold new years resolutions.

Is this a good reason to give up? Absolutely not. But if we want to build a tower, we must prepare the terrain first. This is what January is for: not for tracking down goals but for preparing ourselves to veer the boat in the right direction.

Oh, December. You beautiful cozy lazy month. It is the month in which I delude that I can make 10000 different things, but, instead, I spend all my time reading and being with my family. Not a bad thing to do, don’t you agree?

December is also when winter begins. People see winter as a gloomy season, but I see it as the season of rest. If you look around, winter is when Nature goes to rest. Some animals go into hibernation, plants look dead, and sprouts and seeds lie sleeping under the snow. Winter is when Nature takes it slow.

This November has been weird. If I had to describe it, my first instinct would be to say that it felt like slipped time. After all, my emotional status has been all over the place, with moments of genuine excitement and moments of dread.

November is usually a bad month. It is always full of bad memories and events. Even this year, November hit again early in the month: once again, I had to attend a November funeral. So I was ready to accept another black month in which the best I could do was to collect the pieces.

It was an October that didn’t look like October: the maximum temperatures never went under 25 °C; it was almost always sunny, and everything looked more like spring than autumn.

This threw me off a bit. At the moment I am writing, it is Halloween, yet I do not really feel it. Well, I didn’t feel the October vibes for the other part of the month, either. So I will probably call this month September 2.0, hope for a more traditional November (or not; I am okay with mild temperatures this year), and move on.