It’s the first of September.
Yesterday afternoon I was at a barbecue and someone mentioned something happening later in the month. Hold on, I said. Let me put that in before I forget. And I got my phone out, the way you do, and opened the calendar.
Here’s the thing about calendars. They never open on the day you’re looking for. They open on today.
So before I’d got anywhere near the date I wanted, I’d seen the week. Not deliberately — it was simply there, sitting underneath the thing I was trying to type. Tuesday. Wednesday. The two things on Thursday I’d forgotten I had said yes to.
I put the phone back in my pocket, picked up the conversation where I’d left it, and had a thoroughly good afternoon. But something in me had gone quiet, and it stayed quiet for a good ten minutes.
If you keep your calendar on your phone, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You go in to add one thing and you come out having read the whole week.
Because today it’s September.
Children go back this week. The traffic thickens. Evening classes restart, out-of-office replies come down, and people begin saying “Q4” out loud as though it were a season. Even if you have no children, no office and no intention of ever using the word Q4, the ground changes under the week and you feel it.
Summer loosens its grip. Autumn starts. And Christmas turns up on the horizon like something you were supposed to have prepared for.
And if something has been niggling — you’ll know within about two seconds whether it has — then the turn of the season does something particular to it.
It makes the question louder.
In my experience it’s rarely the question people expect. It isn’t usually where else could I go? That one has a habit of reproducing the same week somewhere with a different postcode. It’s the plainer one sitting underneath it. Do I want to carry on like this?
Which is the harder question. And this is an unusually good week in which to be asked it.
Because for a few days, right at the start of September, you can see.
The autumn is drawn and not yet lived. The commitments are in the diary. The routines are visible. Everything already booked, everything you know will need doing, the whole shape of the four months between here and Christmas — laid out in front of you at once, before you’re inside it and too busy to look up.
That view closes by the middle of the month. It always does. By then you open the calendar and it does exactly what it did at the barbecue — it opens on today — except that today has four things on it, and you add your one date and put the phone away without having seen anything at all.
So while it’s still open, three questions. You needn’t answer them on paper. Reading them is enough — the ones that matter will still be there after you’ve finished.
What feels good to be going back to?
What are you doing simply because it is what happens next?
And what question went quiet over the summer without ever quite going away?
You don’t need answers today. And you don’t need to do anything about them either — not this week, and not because a calendar turned over. Nothing has to be decided in September.
But there are four months of the year left. You can look at them and think: right, here we go again until Christmas.
Or you can ask the other question.
What would you like to have happen between now and Christmas?
Not what should happen. Not what everyone else needs from you. Not what would look most sensible written down.
What would you like to have happen?
It may be nothing dramatic at all. One conversation you’ve been putting off. One decision finally given a proper hour instead of an exhausted twenty minutes at eleven at night. Something started. Something stopped. A bit more room.
Or it may simply be that you’d like the next four months to feel rather less inevitable than the last four did.
It’s a good place to look up from what you’ve been doing and notice whether you still want to be going in this direction.
Whichever way that turns out.
Rosaleen
P.S. Carry on, or stop. For some people that question has been running quietly for a very long time without ever moving. If that’s familiar, I’ve made something short for exactly that — a few minutes to take. Nothing is decided by taking it. It’s called Carry On Or Stop? — Go here: realradiantlife.co.uk/3am