Solstice

Northern midwinter – midsummer in the south. The real turning-point of the year, rather than the somewhat farcical festival of so-called ‘Christ-mas’, and the even more arbitrary one of the calendrical ‘New Year’ (for the western calendar, at least).

Being back ‘up north’ again, the darkness of the winter-time really bites, and it’s made even worse by the natural dull-grey gloom of England (though I’ll admit that today is actually bright and clear, for a change). I’m usually up well before 6am, so it’s a full two or even three hours later before the first hints of something resembling daylight finally appears; many days it never gets past that. Easy to become withdrawn, asocial, morose – a stultifying nothingness, a null-state.

But this time there is almost a sense of rebirth, hints of change, hints of life returning. Can’t quite describe why – and it doesn’t directly shift the torpor, anyway, just suggests that positive change is a quiet possibility now, is all.

With Silos at last gone to press, I’m already well at work on the next book – my ninth this year, amazingly, since I only started the publishing operation in March. Aiming to get this one – yet another in the enterprise-architecture series, “The Service-Oriented Enterprise: enterprise architecture and viable services” – completed by mid-January, so as to have physical copies in time for the TOGAF San Diego conference at the start of February. (Will have to post my current production-list here somewhen: probably well over a year’s full-time work in that lot alone… 🙂 )

May not be a wonderful life, perhaps, but life does go on, and no doubt as it should.

Happy Solstice, everyone.