ManicDDaily

The last few years have led me to the conclusion that I should simply find a way to skip fall.   That sounds like a dance or marital arts move – as in “skip jump” or “break-fall”–but what I’m talking about is that breathtaking (in all senses of the word) period from mid-September (beginning from around the time of year that first the World Trade Center, then a few years later, Lehman Brothers, fell) until Christmas.

The very beginning of September is acceptable.  Even pleasant.  It can still get steamily hot, but there’s a halcyon edge to the sunlight.  The sky is more often blue than white; the farmer’s markets smell like apples; if you live in those parts of  New York City where they still have Korean vegetable stands, the sidewalks are laden with chrysanthemums.  Yes, in early September, you have to get the kids back to school, or, if you’re lucky, move them to college.  But, with practice,  you find that either of those goals can be pretty readily accomplished with several rolls of duct tape and a usable credit card.

But once September merges into October, a go-for-the-throat pressure sinks its teeth into New York City life.   By November/early December, this morphs into a go-for-the-jugular stress which makes one  forget how really beautiful the leaves just were.

So much to do.  Right now.

Do people live this way in the rest of the country?   Certainly, they did not in prior history.  They were physically busier—think of the difficulty of having to heat water just to wash clothes.  (Of course, in the City, I have to carry my laundry up and down a few flights of stairs, and used to have to drag it across two courtyards.  Yes, I appreciate that’s not the same as gathering wood.)

And yet, the busy-ness of today’s constant mind gyrations—the nonstop, if often inconsequential, “right-nowness” of a life lived on the computer—has its own wear and tear.  (Presumably, in prior ages people got to sit quietly for at least a little bit, watching the fire heat up their laundry water.)   Of course, people can probably sit quietly now too, even in New York, without multiple Microsoft “windows”, constant channel changing, commercial breaks, cell phones, emails, deadlines, if they have either (i) a large trust fund, and/or (ii) a certain force of will.

Enough whining!  I felt a tide turn today as we crossed the December mid-point, a place  where it suddenly became clear that what “needs” to get done before the end of the year either will (because it’s already almost done), or won’t.

And then, we will enter those freezing days of January, February, March, when everything—buildings, sidewalk, street, sky—becomes so grey that it’s hard, for a time, to measure the progression of the season.  The words “hunker down” will line our turned-up collars, and we will know once again that we are “in it” for the long haul.

Which, from December’s perspective, looks like a great relief.