Oh September, I'm never quite sure about you. I love the fall and look forward to cooler weather, but there's just something about you that throws me off.
Here in North Carolina, summer still hasn't left the building. The long, hot, humid days persist, with only tempting glimpses of cooler weather.
The light is already different, though. The days are certainly getting shorter. Kids are back in school and college students have disappeared into their dorm rooms. Vacations are over. Calendars are filling up again. And everywhere you look, people are buying planners and notebooks (ME) as though THIS TIME they're finally going to become the organized person they were always meant to be.
Meanwhile, YOU may be feeling a little edgy and wondering why the changing season has somehow made you contemplate your entire life.
Turns out, human beings have been paying attention to seasonal transitions for a very long time.
There's a name for the space between seasons
Ayurveda—the traditional Indian system of health and wellbeing—has a concept called Ritusandhi.
Ritu means season. Sandhi means junction.
The meeting place between seasons. Ritusandhi.
In Ayurveda, the transition from one season to another is considered a time that deserves particular attention. The body and mind are adjusting, and the habits that suited the season we are leaving may not suit the one we're entering. Rather than abruptly carrying one season into the next, the practice is to notice the shift and gradually adjust with it.
I love the simplicity of that idea and everything it holds.
We tend to focus on beginnings.
Ritusandhi asks us to pay attention to the junction.
And fall is one heck of a junction.
The rhythm of everyday life begins to change.
Summer encourages us to unwind and unclench. It helps loosen the edges of life a little. Days are longer, schedules shift, folks travel. Dinner gets pushed back because it's still light outside. Grandkids come to visit. Bedtimes become suggestions.
Then fall starts winding things up again.
The alarm clock matters again. School and work schedules return. Activities restart. The days themselves begin closing in earlier.
For some of us, the transition is much bigger than a calendar shuffle. A child has left for college. Retirement has suddenly turned from something you've been dreaming about into the strange reality of waking up Monday morning with nowhere you're required to be. A parent needs more care than they used to. A relationship has changed. The house is quieter than it was. Maybe you're not quite sure which direction to go next.
And let me tell you, old rhythms linger. After decades of organizing life around school years and college calendars, September can still bring that familiar urge to get organized, settle into a schedule and get back to business—even when no one in the house is going back to school.
Sometimes nothing dramatic has happened at all. Life simply feels different.
That's the thing about transitions: the event itself doesn't have to be enormous for the internal shift to be real.
Change happens outside. Transition happens within.
William Bridges, who spent much of his career studying transitions, made a distinction I've always found useful:
Change is the event. Transition is what happens inside us because of it.
And transition, he believed, begins with an ending.
That's easy enough to understand when the change is painful. It gets more complicated when it's something we wanted.
You can be ridiculously proud of the kid you just dropped off at college and cry the whole damn drive home. You can spend years dreaming about retirement and then miss the structure of your workday. You can adore having the grandchildren for the summer and experience a peculiar combination of sadness and sweet relief when they go home and nobody asks you for another snack.
We tend to judge these feelings against what we think we're supposed to feel: I should be grateful. I should be excited. I should be enjoying this.
But an ending doesn't stop being an ending because what comes next is good.
And perhaps that's what I like so much about Ritusandhi. It doesn't ask us to rush from one season into the next. It acknowledges the junction—the in-between.
Bridges had a name for this psychological in-between too: the neutral zone.
The old rhythm has ended, but the new one hasn't quite become familiar yet.
Most of us are terrible at this.
We want to know what's next. We want a plan. We want to feel settled again. So we fill the calendar, start a project, clean out a closet or purchase yet another planner that will absolutely change our lives this time.
But the unsettled middle has a purpose. It's where adjustment happens, where we grieve what's ending, and where old patterns can loosen enough for something new to emerge.
Perhaps we don't need to get out of the middle quite so quickly.
Perhaps we need to notice it.
Your biology is paying attention too
There's another layer to seasonal mood changes: light.
As the days shorten in fall, the amount and timing of daylight we're exposed to changes. Light is one of the major signals that regulates our circadian rhythm—the internal clock involved in sleep, wakefulness, hormones, energy and mood.
We see the strongest example of this in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a form of depression with a recurring seasonal pattern. Research into winter-pattern SAD points to changes involving serotonin, melatonin and the sleep-wake cycle.
I won't bore you with all the details, and most people won't develop SAD. But its existence tells us something important:
Human beings respond to seasons.
Our bodies are still paying attention to light and darkness, sleep and wakefulness, movement and rest—even if we'd prefer them to cooperate with our calendars and screens.
So consider what's happening in early fall.
The light changes at the same time that our schedules, family rhythms and sometimes our roles are changing.
That's a lot of adjustment happening all at once.
Which brings us right back to Ritusandhi and its wonderfully simple instruction:
Pay attention at the junction.
A Mood Check for the season you're in
We notice we're tired, restless, sad, irritable or unsettled and often immediately start looking for a solution.
What if the first step wasn't fixing anything?
What if it was simply getting curious about what we're feeling?
At Mood Indigo, I've been thinking about this as a simple Mood Check:
Notice. Name. Nurture.
NOTICE — What's changing?
Perhaps it's obvious. Perhaps you have no clue. Your child left home. You retired. Your schedule changed. Or perhaps it's subtler—the evenings feel different, your energy has shifted, or you're craving a little more quiet than you did a month ago.
NAME — How do you actually feel about it?
Skip the answer you're supposed to give.
You can love fall and feel melancholy at the same time. You can be proud of your child and lonely without them. You can be grateful for retirement and miss your work. You can love your family dearly and still be delighted when they finally leave your house.
Name what's actually there, what you're truly feeling.
NURTURE — What would support you right now?
Maybe it's rest, movement, a friend, a good cry, some time outside, making something, cooking something wonderful or going somewhere new.
Maybe it's saying no. Maybe it's saying yes.
Maybe it's a long hot shower, something that smells absolutely glorious, and twenty uninterrupted minutes in which nobody asks you where anything is.
Nurturing yourself doesn't have to become another big thing to accomplish.
It's simply responding to what you noticed in yourself.
Pay attention at the junction
That's the piece of wisdom I want to carry into fall:
Pay attention at the junction.
We spend so much time trying to get from what was to whatever comes next that we often miss the present moment—the place where we actually are.
You don't need to reinvent yourself because September arrived. You don't need to optimize your morning routine or have your next chapter figured out by October.
Notice the change.
Notice yourself in it.
And spend a little time in the in-between.
I know there's something worth listening to in there.
— Réa
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