“Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.” — Henry David Thoreau
After a wonderful weekend in Gothenburg – which I highly recommend you visit if you are searching for a long weekend of relaxed wanderings – we returned to a Glasgow where it’s safe to say that the nights are fair drawing in1 and with the ever darkening evenings marking the change of the season I find myself looking ahead at the coming months; trees are turning and with them the joy of autumn flourishes.
I’ve always preferred Autumn to Winter as the slow folding of time takes us through profound change, skies darken earlier, plants return to the earth, the light changes day by day. Equally Spring is preferable to Summer as it brings with it new energies fuelled by the world around us re-emerging, days brightening, and the promise of new peeks over the horizon.
I’ve always been drawn to change, always find the turn of a season motivates me anew. I am not one for resolutions made at the chime of the New Year for during those long days of Winter there can be little to distinguish a dark and cold early December morning from a mid-January evening, neither light nor temperature vary. Give me substantive change, something I can see and sense, and my brain suddenly sparks into life with a rejuvenated sense of purpose.
A few weeks ago I sensed this change was coming, Autumn was upon us and new motivations were found and plans made to get back to the gym, and to finally book that wonderful weekend away. And how wonderful it was; a beautiful city, small enough to walk around, big enough to hold more secrets to return to in the future, filled with friendly smiling faces, I have rarely felt so relaxed.
Once home, I felt re-invigorated and with the hint of Autumn on the nostrils I look to other pursuits and ponder the novel that has been creeping back into my mind these past few weeks, plot points are crystallising, character emotions emerging, and even now as I write this post it appears that my previous lost prose is returning.
It were ever thus.
Be it Spring or Autumn I always find myself itching to dive into something new, a yearning to immerse myself completely. In Spring it’s easy to find renewed vigour for something new with the premise of taking it forward into the rest of the year. Autumn offers a different motivation in the desire to blanket myself from the increasingly grey world as a means of escape.
With a successful, if already belatedly painful, gym session behind me (and another looming this very evening!), my mind is turning once more, cogs whirring like an antique time piece, and the novel I’ve long hoped to finish is being reshaped in the hope that I can capture its new shape in the coming months.
I am mindful to guard against my own habits, where an interest is piqued and followed to a place beyond immersion to an entirely unhealthy location that occupies my mind over all else. Yet that was then and this is now, and with my life and self irrevocably changed for the better in the past couple of years, I welcome this new Autumn heartily, safe in the knowledge that my occupations will be split appropriately across more important matters, with the heart overruling the head more often than not.
And, if nothing else, I have two dogs to walk.
- A Scottish colloquialism to represent the darker evenings that impact our northerly latitude as we head towards Winter. [↩]