Opinion Express View on the end of the year: The Dead week

Another new year approaches, with its share of upheavals big and small, and the promise of unflagging pace. The race never lets up, which is why it would be foolhardy to imagine that all those feel-good social-media forwards about waking up and smelling the coffee and learning to take things slow might actually manifest themselves in one’s life. If anything, for those caught in the 9-5 grind, the commitment of manic Mondays and fatigued Fridays will remain truer than ever.

Yet, not all needs to be gloom and doom. The new year is still a while into the future and the toils of the soon-to-be-old one are already bleeding into the sepia tone of the past. The last few days of a year are that chimera one is forever seeking — mellow and wispy, aspiring to nothing. Emails beget chirpy out-of-office automated responses, to-do lists lose their urgency. A Beckettian wind sweeps through workplaces that look somewhat desolate for not being full to capacity.

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As vacation season lingers on, for those still in attendance, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes…” — only it isn’t awful, nor is it weighed down by guilt or single-minded focus. There’s an air of bonhomie and a sense of languor so utterly divorced from the usual demands of duty and ambition, accomplishment and hustle, that it feels almost carefree, luxurious even.

In a country racing to become the third-largest economy in the world, rest is only the lot of a privileged few. For most others, it is the end goal, the pursuit of a lifetime’s industry. Yet, the fading light of December leaves behind an important lesson — that some days are meant to be lived outside of the calendar, grasping with both hands their offer of deferring all work of urgency to the future. Some days, tomorrow is good enough. If rest comes at a premium, a pause can be the grace we embrace.