On Finding the Energy

I’ve always been a fan of January. 

It’s a month with an unnecessarily bad rap in my opinion, a post-holiday hangover, hit the gym, abstain from alcohol, lean into hibernation like it’s a force you can’t fight, sort of month. Many let themselves off the rare hook from forced busyness and agree to slow down and do less. “Wintering!” so goes the refrain, suspending self-judgement for a few generous weeks.

For me, January is a delight. Every day longer, lighter, trending upward. Most often, and this year especially, colder, sunnier, brighter than all other winter months. For me, January is a burst of energy that needs channeling. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about energy this January. I find my mood, focus, and creative aptitude incredibly impacted by the light and how it moves throughout the day. One’s relationship to the weather and its parent season becomes even more extreme when you live in the deep Nordics as I have for nearly a decade. The cold months are a grey blanket of rolling darkness, a practice in optimizing for that brief breath when the clouds give way. But then there lies summer and oh, what a summer - a cosmic looping haze of midnight sun and hyper social buzz, a witness to how easily your body clock reorients to the rhythms of the natural world. 

Perhaps because of this, I am a compulsive weather checker. It’s a habit shared by farmers, surfers, photographers and few others - people who know that winning the day in their respective little world hinges on the right conditions and being in the right place at the right time. There are few anxieties I feel more acutely than knowing a perfect swim day waits in close proximity and I’m not there to lap it up due to poor planning. 

This energetic January was the first of my life’s Januarys that I’ve been my one and only boss. My schedule is my own, my days are mine to structure, and at the moment my projects span both left and right brain. My energy is also mine to wrangle, jumpstart, harness, channel, and sometimes just let be. This January I’ve become acutely reacquainted with the relationship between time, energy and what I’ll call Purposeful Orientation - the activities we engage in that, for whatever reason, make the hours in our days feel like time well spent and not just filler to stave off duty, boredom, obligation, or restlessness. 

I’ve been reminded this January of years past and how my energy and Purposeful Orientation have ebbed and flowed month over month, particularly during the pandemic years when all scheduled life turned upside down. I now know, with years of consecutive datapoints, that November is not a month to be fussed with whatsoever. It is a month for not-working, fleeing to warmer climates, spending all my time surfing and rejoining my body. Doing anything else, I’ve come to find, is a risk to my fragile interior makeup. On the flip side, April to late June is, without fail, my most energetic time of year. Filled with pent up winter energy, the ambition, scale and quantity of projects I can take on, power through, and bang out to completion would seem completely overwhelming at any other time of year. But late Spring? This is Go Time. 

This insight is a golden nugget, a ground truth of personal orienteering and fulfillment. But in my previous life, I was doing nothing with this knowledge to rethink how I worked and lived. 

When you work a 9-to-5, you rescind not just control of your schedule and income potential to your employer but inadvertently any meaningful relationship to your own energy as well. Every weekday is a work day, regardless of the internal or external conditions. Save for the occasional sick day, every sluggish unslept morning is nevertheless spent dragging oneself to work, making your way through a day that probably should have been channeled differently for everyone’s sake.

Perhaps you deploy some sort of optimization strategy to control your limited leash on time - Meeting Free Wednesdays, Morning Focus Blocks, on it goes. But in reality, the orientation of the bulk of your waking hours is dictated by a commitment to your employer’s mission and bottom line. In turn, your relationship to your own energy - how best to harness it, conserve it, channel it, enjoy it - can become unexpectedly secondary, while the measure and value of your time often becomes a distorted reflection of its busyness.

This January, due to some last minute timeline shifts, I had more unallocated time on my hands than expected. In an attempt to stave off the panic from my own lack of busyness, I decided to spend the lighter month as a student of my own time and energy as I look ahead to the oncoming seasons, now more familiar with my relationship to each. January days where the grey rain would take over Copenhagen I oriented, purposefully, to allow for rest, exercise, ambient thinking, low intensity admin, and mental and creative wandering without the pressure of output. In exchange, the days where the winter sun burst through and carried late into the afternoons felt cognitively high octane. Highly productive with little effort, these days I treat like a scarce resource that must be exploited til it’s wrung dry. These are the days I orient deliberately for output, creation, important meetings and forward thinking work that demands optimism and acutely engaged senses to be worth my time at all. 

This study in energy and intention has prompted an interesting exercise for the coming year, one focused on happiness engineering, creative stimulation, business acumen, and life rhythms. A few questions I hope to answer:

What does orienting a year more purposefully around our mental rhythms do for our happiness? 

What does our creative and intellectual output look like when aligned more deliberately and intentionally to our energy supply? 

Moreover: is it possible to create a financially sustainable, mentally stimulating professional life optimized for when you are at your best?

Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• Butter Notes by Nils Frahm, La Femme d’Argent by Air, on loops

• How To Look Busy, an episode from the The Atlantic podcast series on time and how we spend it.

• Re-reading In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, a classic 1930s Japanese book of essays on light, darkness, and how different our lit spaces might feel if the Japanese had invented electricity instead of the West.

• Opting to spend the Danish coronation of the new King Frederik X at SMK, one of Copenhagen’s best museums, empty of all people that afternoon and full of unexpected Danish modernists I’ve come to love.

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life.