The beginning of this year’s winter arc

🎶 Wake up, wake up, it’s the first of the month 🎶

September is probably the most important month in my life; it’s the month that has encompassed most of my biggest trials, changes and ‘start-agains’, but this probably shouldn’t be surprising given how my life, for the longest period of time, revolved almost entirely around the academic year. September has always felt a little bit more like New Year to me than New Year itself.

This year is no different though, sans the educational element. I’ve been working on myself, physically and mentally, for a few months now, but with the onset of the darker seasons, autumn and winter, it feels like the next six months, September to February, should be an opportunity for deeper work. The cliché lock-in moment. Or the ‘Winter Arc’, as Instagram has apparently decided to call it.

I’m not talking about disappearing into a cave for six months and emerging in March as some completely different person. Most of what I want to do is actually incredibly boring. Walk more. Eat better. Read more books. Write more things. Finish some of the projects I’ve been endlessly tinkering with. Get myself into routines that make the days feel a little more deliberate, rather than constantly relying on whether or not I happen to feel motivated that morning.

That’s probably the point, really. I don’t particularly care about becoming some mythical ‘best version of myself’ by March. I’d just quite like to get there with six months’ worth of evidence that, when I said I wanted to do something, I actually did it.

Now, I know talk is cheap. It’s easy to blog about all these amazing things that you’re going to accomplish because talking about doing them feels suspiciously like doing them, except you’re not actually doing anything. It’s like a step below faking it before you make it; you’re faking it and not making it!

So this is all I’m going to say on it until the next check-in point: October 1st.

Come then, I want to tell you about all the steps I’ve walked. The junk food I’ve avoided. The projects I’ve finished. The books I’ve absorbed. Maybe some of the things I’ve completely failed at too, because I don’t imagine for one second that the next month is going to go perfectly.

The writing here will continue being more consistent as well; I’m starting to get a bit of a rhythm for it now, and let’s face it, that spreadsheet isn’t gonna finish itself.