Still Four Months Left

There is something about September that always feels like a beginning to me.

Perhaps it always will.

After more than twenty-five years working in education, September is lodged somewhere deep in my internal calendar as the real new year. January has never quite managed to compete. September was new shoes and new timetables, freshly labelled copies, classrooms put back together after the summer, lists and plans and that peculiar mixture of anticipation and nerves that accompanied the beginning of another school year.

Even now, four Septembers since I last returned to my own classroom, I can still feel it.

Our children are back at school. The school bags have resumed their positions around the house. Lunches are being made again. Alarms are set. There are places to be and times to be there. After the looseness of summer, our days have acquired edges again.

And outside, September is quietly getting on with being September.

When I get up around six now, it is dark. Not winter dark, not yet, but dark enough that I switch on the lamps before I put the kettle on. The mornings are heavy with dew. There are still warm afternoons and windows left open, but the light has changed. The garden sounds different. Evenings arrive sooner.

Summer hasn’t entirely gone, and autumn hasn’t entirely arrived.

But something has shifted.

And perhaps because September has always felt so much like a beginning to me, I found myself thinking about the months ahead this week.

Between now and Christmas.

It’s a phrase we use so casually, isn’t it?

Between now and Christmas, I’d like to…

We’ll get that done before Christmas.

The next few months will fly.

Sure it’ll be Christmas before we know it.

And then, almost without noticing, we begin treating the year as though it’s nearly finished.

Except it isn’t.

There are still four months left.

Four whole months.

And when I stopped and really thought about that this week, it felt surprisingly significant.

We have a habit of getting ahead of ourselves

I don’t think this is particularly a September problem. I think we do it all year. In January, we’re looking towards spring. By spring, we’re thinking about summer. August hasn’t finished before autumn begins appearing around us, and once September arrives, Christmas starts shimmering somewhere in the distance. Then December comes, and before we’ve even finished the leftover turkey, we’re being encouraged to reinvent ourselves for January.

There is always something coming next.

And, of course, some of that is lovely. I love anticipation. I love the changing seasons. I love thinking about autumn while summer is still lingering around the edges, and I will happily begin thinking about Christmas long before anyone could reasonably argue that it is necessary. I make plans. I write lists. I create things months before they will be needed. I like knowing what’s coming.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with looking forward. But I do think there is a difference between preparing for what is coming and mentally leaving where we are.

And perhaps that is what I’ve been noticing.

September can so easily become the beginning of the long run towards Christmas.

Autumn becomes something to organise.

October becomes something to prepare for.

November becomes Christmas preparation.

December becomes Christmas.

And then suddenly we’re standing in January wondering where the last four months went.

But they haven’t gone yet.

They’re here.

Four months is actually quite a lot of life

When you think about the year in months, four can sound small.

We’ve already had eight. There are only four remaining.

But when you think about four months as days, mornings, evenings, weekends and ordinary moments, it begins to look very different.

There are more than a hundred days between the beginning of September and the end of December.

More than a hundred mornings to wake up to.

More than a hundred evenings.

There will be ordinary Tuesdays when nothing particularly interesting happens.

Saturday mornings when somebody needs to be somewhere.

Dinners thrown together because everyone is hungry.

Walks taken because the weather is unexpectedly lovely.

Walks abandoned because it isn’t.

There will be books started and perhaps books left unfinished.

Cups of tea made and forgotten.

School days.

Work days.

Rainy days.

Days when the house feels calm and days when everyone seems to need something at exactly the same time.

There will be conversations we don’t yet know we’re going to have.

Plans that will change.

People we’ll see.

Things we’ll laugh about.

Something will almost certainly break.

Something else will work out better than expected.

There will be all those tiny pieces of life that never appear on a calendar because we don’t know they’re coming.

And I think that’s what struck me most.

When we talk about having “four months left”, it can sound like a countdown.

But it isn’t really.

It’s life.

Not four months to fix everything

There is another version of this idea that I don’t particularly like.

You know the one.

There are still four months left!

It’s not too late!

What could you achieve before the end of the year?

You have 118 days to become the person you said you’d be in January!

No thank you.

I don’t want to spend September turning December 31st into another deadline.

I don’t need a list of everything I haven’t accomplished this year. I don’t particularly want to know how many books I could theoretically read, kilometres I could walk, habits I could establish or projects I could complete if I really put my mind to it.

There will be things I want to do between now and Christmas. Of course there will. There is work I’m excited about, writing I want to do, things I want to create. I want to return to projects that have been sitting quietly while summer happened. There are family things and home things and ordinary practical things. But I don’t want these four months to become an exercise in catching up, because catching up implies that we’re somehow behind. And I’m not sure we are.

Maybe we’re simply here, at the beginning of September, with whatever has happened in the first eight months of the year behind us and whatever happens next still unknown.

There is something quite freeing in that.

September has always felt like another chance

Maybe this is partly why September appeals to me so much.

It has the freshness of January without quite so much pressure attached to it. Nobody is demanding a new version of us. The calendar doesn’t insist that everything must change.

We can simply settle back into routines and see how they feel.

This September, our own routines are changing again. Both of our children are back at school. The house becomes quiet earlier in the morning. There are school runs and lunches and bags and schedules again. There are my own workdays to shape around family life, Pilates, trips to the pony, things that need doing at home and all the other pieces that make up an ordinary week.

And I don’t yet know exactly what the rhythm of this autumn will look like. I’m learning it by living it. I think perhaps that’s another thing I’ve become more comfortable with as I’ve grown older: not everything needs to be decided in advance. Sometimes we just have to live our way into it. We can make a plan and then discover that it doesn’t suit us. We can think a routine will work and realise that it doesn’t. We can change our minds. We can begin again on an entirely unremarkable Wednesday.

We don’t need January.

We don’t even necessarily need a beginning.

The months deserve their turn

September is one of my favourite months. I love its contradictions: the warm afternoons and cold mornings, open windows and lamps switched on, apples and the last of the summer flowers, heavy dew and blue skies. That first jumper in the morning that you’re carrying over your arm by lunchtime.

September isn’t summer and it isn’t quite autumn.

It doesn’t need to choose.

And I don’t want to rush through it simply because October is waiting.

October will get its turn. There will be darker evenings and leaves gathering along the roads. Halloween will arrive. There will be pumpkins and candles and evenings when staying home feels particularly appealing.

And then November will have its turn too. November, which so often gets treated as little more than the waiting room for Christmas, has a character all of its own. Bare branches. Earlier darkness. Cold mornings. The first proper sense of winter approaching. Soup and books and coats by the door.

And eventually December will come. There will be Christmas lists and lights and familiar music and all the traditions that make their way back into our homes each year.

But December doesn’t need September’s days.

It has its own.

There is no need to borrow them in advance.

Perhaps ordinary time is the time we’re looking for

I think a lot about ordinary days.

Probably because the older I get, the more I realise how much of life is made from them.

We remember the big days because they’re easy to mark.

Birthdays.

Christmases.

Holidays.

First days.

Last days.

Celebrations.

Milestones.

But when I think about the periods of my life I have loved most, the memories aren’t neatly confined to those occasions. They’re often completely unremarkable: someone sitting at the kitchen table, a particular drive home, a dog asleep beside the fire, children coming through the door and dropping everything exactly where I’ve asked them not to drop it, a conversation while making dinner, tea in the garden, a walk on an evening when we nearly didn’t bother going.

Nothing that would have made me think at the time: Remember this.

And yet somehow, I do.

Perhaps that’s why I’m increasingly reluctant to treat ordinary time as something we have to get through on our way to somewhere more interesting. These next four months will contain Christmas, but they will also contain an enormous number of days that aren’t Christmas.

And those days count too.

I don’t want to make the most of them

Even that phrase feels a little demanding to me now.

Make the most of the time.

I know what it means, and I’ve probably used it plenty of times myself.

But sometimes I think we’re already asking enough of our days.

Perhaps they don’t all need to be made the most of.

Some can simply be lived.

A Saturday can be spent doing laundry and driving people places and making something easy for dinner.

An evening can disappear into television.

A morning can be slow because we’re tired.

A beautiful day can be appreciated without turning it into an outing.

We don’t have to squeeze meaning out of every moment for the moment to have mattered.

And we certainly don’t have to arrive at December 31st with evidence that we used the final four months of the year efficiently.

Maybe the point is simply not to dismiss them before they’ve happened.

There are still four months left

I have no idea what the next four months will bring. I know some of what is written on the calendar. I know some of what I’m hoping to do. I know the seasons will change because they always do.

But beyond that? Life will fill in the details.

There are mornings we haven’t woken up to yet, meals we haven’t eaten, conversations we haven’t had, books we haven’t opened and places we don’t yet know we’ll go. There are ordinary days ahead whose significance we couldn’t possibly recognise from here. And somewhere amongst all of that will be autumn and Halloween and November and Christmas and the ending of another year.

They’ll come.

We don’t need to hurry them.

So perhaps this isn’t an invitation to set four-month goals. It isn’t a challenge to finish the year strongly. And it certainly isn’t a reminder to hurry up and become whoever you thought you were going to be back in January.

It’s simply something I wanted to remember myself.

The year isn’t nearly over.

There are still four whole months left.

Not four months to optimise.

Not four months to catch up.

Not four months to make the most of.

Just four months to live.

And for now, that’s more than enough.

I’d love to know — does September make you feel as though the year is beginning again, or do you find yourself already looking ahead towards its end? And what are you hoping simply to enjoy in the months ahead? Tell me in the comments below.

Chat very soon,

Ciara x

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