Fighting the February "Blahs"

The worst month of the year is here once again. 

It's cold outside. The days are short and grey. No holiday is in sight, and the flu is spreading like warm butter. 

Even the Super Bowl has come and gone, leaving in its wake power outages, disappointing commercials and one unanswered question:

How will we survive until March comes?

The obvious answer is to buy a pet.  It provides a new distraction and some fun in your life during an otherwise dull period.  But you might regret this later.  When the novelty has worn off, you might be left with a cat named Trouble who tears up your furniture, drools everywhere and insists on being entertained 24 hours a day. 

This situation is where I've found myself ever since I got a cat in February of 2004.  You should definitely try something else. 

You could take a vacation to some tropical destination where life doesn't feel so gloomy, but that's hard to plan on short notice and you probably blew all your money and vacation time at Christmas anyway.  Besides, when you got back the February cold would hit you in the face even harder.

You should probably form a different plan.

You could start drinking heavily so as to float through this dismal month in a mental fog, but that might get you fired.  And doing so would leave you vulnerable to catching one of the 16 types of airborne illness floating around, which would leave you even more miserable. 

You might want to consider a better alternative.

You could pack up and move to the Gulf Coast, where you would get an extra 3-day vacation for Mardi Gras built into every February. But that's probably not a realistic option for this year. Mardi Gras is next week.

Besides, your children might eventually get mad at you for raising them in a place where it never snows, and you'd have to evacuate in fear of your life every hurricane season, which, trust me, isn't much fun. 

So you aren't going to be able to rely on that plan either. 

Instead, you and I just have to bundle up and make peace with the worst month of the year.  But how?

I'm trying hard to find a silver lining this year's winter gloom.  I'm reading more. I'm volunteering.  I'm training for a half-marathon, taking Spanish classes, and trying to fill my weekends with cultural outings and plans with people I like. My wife and I found a new church that's shaking us out of our spiritual ruts.

In short, I'm using the bad weather and the lack of distractions winter brings to force myself into doing positive things that I might have otherwise neglected.  

It's working so far.  While I still hate the cold and the darkness, the coping strategy of self-renewal and social bonding has made this February (and the back end of January, which can be just as bad) more interesting--and more fun--than any winter I can recall.

I'm sure by the time a sunny spring weekend comes, my brain will be fried, my body will be tired, and I'll yearn to sit in the sun with a refreshing beverage and watch mindless tv on the porch of my favorite sports bar.  That's exactly what I plan to do, when the time gets here.

But until then, I'm stuck with February.  It's cold and it's dark, but, as I've learned this year, at least it can still be interesting.