20 Minutes of Writing: The Shortest Day of the Year

Unedited and raw, written from my heart. I start a twenty minute timer and just write.

The day with the least amount of daylight is knocking on my door. I can hear her right now. She wants everyone to know she is here.

We, as a society, dread her.

We spend from about late September right up until she is knocking on our door, complaining about the increasingly darker days that she manifests to remind us she’ll be showing up soon. If you’re in Northern Europe, this time of year also brings these ever wilder, sometimes successive, storms. The howling winds. The lashing rain. Even some cumulonimbus clouds accompany the storms. They roll across the skies on a fierce rampage and announce their enormous presence with a hammering of hail.

As a horse guardian (I don’t use the word owner… my lovely three horses are very much not my possessions, they are my friends, my equals), it’s a tough time of year. Especially here in the Netherlands.

I live in the flattest country on earth. It’s wet, it’s windy. It’s a country where the farmland is engineered to accumulate water so as to keep the urban areas dry and flood free. The land where my horses live is pretty much pure clay. When I’ve made holes in the ground with the ground-boring tool, I have retrieved clumps of clay that I could probably shape into some sort of ceramic pot. This means that at this time of year with the continuous rainfall, the land very quickly becomes saturated and develops into a thick, muddy swamp. Thankfully this year, the new managers of the land have invested in sand tracks so actually the horses and I are no longer battling 60cm of thick mud on the tracks. A day without rain and the sand becomes dry. It feels like a big win in these wetter winters.

But still. The Shortest Day of the Year is knocking on the door.

And today her presence is giving me that very heartfelt ‘meh’ feeling.

There are many reasons the ‘meh’ feeling is here with me today, sitting next to me on my sofa sipping her cup of lemon and ginger tea. The most predominant one she tells me, is coming from the fact that very soon, very likely only a few months away, my Big Move Back to the UK is approaching.

As a human being, I don’t like change.

Admit it, we don’t.

We all have our routines, structures, social connections and a place we call home. Be it a literal dwelling in the form of a house or a flat, or the rucksack on our back if we are globe-trotters out on a travelling adventure. Either way, we get into the rhythm of whatever our lives look like and get comfortable with that. It helps us know what to expect each day we wake up. We know the drill of our own daily existences. But when we close one chapter and open another, everything changes.

And because The Shortest Day of the Year is knocking on the door, so is 2025. She’s showing up with her plans and her ideas, wanting to march right into my house and put them all on display. She’s got a lot of enthusiasm for the Big Move Back to the UK. She’s all raring to go. Her bags are packed. She’s jumping up and down telling me I need to get packing too. I’m sitting here on my sofa together with the ‘meh’ looking at 2025 through my front window as she stands there, waving at us from the street, wearing those awful, tacky, neon HAPPY NEW YEAR light up glasses, feeling conflicted. Somewhere stuck between nostalgia for 2024 and the grieving I feel and will be feeling for the life I will be leaving behind here in The Netherlands; but knowing full well that 2025 is the time for this move to be happening and that I am ready to go, wanting nothing more than to just pack up the whole house right now and just leave before The Shortest Day of the Year.