The quiet weeks of January: what remains when nothing is required

What strikes me every year in the weeks after Epiphany is not what disappears, but what is left behind. The holidays are over — everyone knows that — yet no one seems in a hurry to make it visible. The street lights are still there. Some evenings they’re on. Some evenings they’re not. As if the system hasn’t been switched off, and no one feels the need to look for the button. The quiet weeks of January have begun.

I walk through the neighbourhood on the second day after Epiphany. The city looks the same as last week, but it moves differently. Shops are open, though it doesn’t feel as if they’re waiting for anything. The baker does his work, but speaks less. People come in without a story. They buy what they need and move on.

There is no transition. No new beginning. Just continuation.

An ending without a follow-up

Here, Epiphany is not the start of the year, but the final stone. After that, nothing needs to be wrapped up. Agendas are empty, but not demonstratively so. There is no collective urge to look ahead or to fix anything. The year is allowed to remain as it is for a while.

What I find remarkable about these weeks is that they have no name. They are not a celebration, not preparation, not recovery. They exist outside the calendar. You notice it in small signals: shops keeping half days, squares where no one lingers, conversations that don’t need to go anywhere.

No one asks how your holidays were. That question has already passed.

Silence without emptiness

The silence of this period isn’t about the absence of sound, but the absence of urgency. There is no reason to organise anything, nothing to look forward to, nothing to conclude. What still hangs around does so not because it was forgotten, but because it doesn’t get in the way.

I see a neighbour cross the square and briefly glance up at the street lighting. He doesn’t stop. He shrugs and walks on. It’s not indifference. It’s acceptance. This is not the moment.

In these quiet weeks of January, public life seems to give itself no assignment. Days follow one another without intention. That doesn’t make them empty — just unremarkable.

What becomes visible when nothing is required

Perhaps that is what makes this time so rare: it has no function. It connects nothing and announces nothing. It shows what daily life looks like without an occasion.

When there is no celebration left to refer to and no plan to hold on to, what remains is what was always there. That isn’t special — but it does become visible.

And it is precisely there that something appears which rarely has space the rest of the year: a society that, for a moment, doesn’t have to explain itself.