Seasonal shift
It happened this weekend.
Grindingly the weather shifted, like an inexperienced driver changing gear too soon. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not. I feel it, tense with discomfort and shock, as if sensing something wrong with the very mechanics behind it all.
This year feels like a deck of cards, dropped accidentally and picked up in a hurry, shuffled together in the wrong order. Some landmarks of time are in the right place still. Birthdays, celebrated creatively. Anniversaries, still remembered. Mondays too, looking slightly different, but immoveable and concrete.
But other markers; dates, events, trips, have shifted and changed. Postponed, cancelled, or pencilled in. Non-committal. Subject to change. The sense of time feels like an illusion, a magician’s greatest trick. Slipping in and out of the here and now, bending and stretching. Sprinting through days, before growing weary. Sometimes slowing to a halt so abruptly it’s painful. Tied with my mood; sprinting, slowing, full stop. Unfastened.
This year, autumn feels like the guest who turns up early, catching you half-dressed and unprepared. A sharp reminder that whilst it feels like many things have been put on hold, not everything is patiently waiting on pause. And it may be the first time ever that I’m reluctant to answer the door and let it in; an acknowledgement that this year has blurred and hurried on the way towards its finish line.
I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. There is comfort in the fact that, as flimsy as our plans may be, the seasons are untouched by either the minutiae or the headlines governing our lives. Unaware of the turmoil that has uprooted much of our sense of normalcy.
Nature is wilder than this season we are in; it will not listen to human voices. As more of our lives have had to be controlled and restricted, the reminder that there are things outside our jurisdiction, things that continue on the well worn paths and cycles of millennia, is both soothing and somewhat jarring.
This dichotomy in the shifting of seasons at the moment feels like it could be kind of poignant. And maybe it sums up, in a rather self-indulgent way, more of how I’m feeling right now than I’d really care to admit.