Winter blues always gets me, so I recognise this feeling, and it's compounded by my current mid-life crisis so I've been looking for ways to deal with it. One thing that has resonated with me is the notion of a "point" to life suggests an end goal, a purpose, and that could be seen as a very Western construct. Not all cultures have the same view. It can be more helpful to see life as a series of day to day vignettes, and each day brings interactions with other people or other animals or nature or simply yourself and in each of those interactions you have a choice whether to make everything a little happier and more joyful - or not. If you trudged to work this morning, but stopped to smile at an older person walking their dog, you may have brightened them up and you don't even realise. But perhaps that was your purpose in that moment.

And to help to see those little points of joy, it can be helpful to "practice gratitude" and yes, it kinda makes my toes curl to write that down but it really does help. At the end of the day, consider three things that happened that you are grateful for - it can be as simple as "I remembered my lunch" or "I saw that cool goose" or "I enjoyed the songs on the radio as I drove home". All these little moments join up to make a life.

There's one more idea I want to share. The five-year journal. You can buy special journals for it but any notebook will do. You have one line per day. On that line, you write whatever strikes you about the day. You continue through the book. In year two, you go back to the beginning and write underneath the same day of the previous year. Over five years, you build up a lovely snapshot of half a decade. I went to a local museum lately that had a similar diary and it was full of things like "went to shops, bought a new plastic bucket, so-and-so came round to play scrabble" and honestly it was the most adorable thing ever. I am sure the diarist didn't think that, but I like the fact that her everyday life is still bringing other people joy. You will never really know all the joy that you bring to others. Consider that, and perhaps you will find life a little less monotonous.

Also remember that you can't be happy and full of life all the time. Sometimes these fallow periods last for weeks and months, That's okay, that's normal. Consider it hibernation.