Are you a January resolutions or a September reset person? The latter has always felt more propitious to me, light of the exhaustion of Christmas and with the weather still on our side. Last week, when the Pavlovian response to buying new stationery (for my kids) kicked in, I found myself following a rote impulse to sort my life out by replacing the bag in the vacuum cleaner and committing to an unsustainable course of personal change. This is it! The beginning of a new way of life, driven by sharp pencils and the crispness of autumn.
I mean, it won’t last. But while most of us have read enough advisories cautioning against new year resolutions as durable, somehow September still promises the earth. I can’t shake it. As soon as the breeze picks up and the leaves start to turn, I feel my pilot light ignite – and the urge to sign up to unaffordable personal training sets in. It feels like an ancient response. I’m not writing this while leaning on a dry stone wall or managing my sheepdogs, but still; the sensory changes brought in by autumn surely activate latent energies in all of us. If you can avoid pumpkin spice and survive the costume search for Halloween, September triggers good feelings of renewal via the psychic memory of our serf forebears bringing in the harvest.
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Or, in my case, attempting to do 10 minutes of squats and move last night’s dishes from the sink to the dishwasher before lunchtime. As ever when trying to implement new habits, the question is how you trick yourself into making them stick. It’s like that classic scene from Road Runner, when, running out beyond the edge of the cliff, Wile E Coyote keeps going until he looks down and drops like a stone. Will a magnetised whiteboard, stuck to the fridge, keep me running on thin air for a bit longer? What about a new trainer, texting me motivational messages – “let’s go soldier mode!” – at 7am every day? After all these years of failed resolutions, has the answer to fixing my life really resided in buying sandwich bags for the efficient storage of leftovers?
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This is part of the problem, of course: that any commitment to change is used by most of us as a pretext to spend money. I assume that, in medieval times, the serf stockpiling for winter didn’t believe that the key to surviving til spring lay in a trip to the Container Store or buying a bar-grade blender. We can’t buy our way into new habits (although, I have to say, my new blender is amazing) unless it’s backed up with behavioural changes that come from – who knows?
Panic, probably. Which is why, in spite of all the scepticism, it still feels to me as if the September reset is real. As someone pointed out to me yesterday, it marks the entry point into the spookiest season, which means different things as we age. Influencers can run the clock on our finite number of summers, but as you get older it’s the onset of autumn that really turns up the burner on our sense of time passing. Foreshadowing death, the urge to get an arsing move on at this time of year is strong, and although it’s a line or argument that worries me – not least because it means I share psychological traits with eg notoriously crisis-surfing ex prime minister Boris Johnson – I’ve always considered panic a much underrated motivational force.
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And so, this year, I’ve gone to the literature for help in utilising the September force and discovered there’s a whole movement around it. Contrary to new year, when we tank our chances of success before we’ve even started by creating goals that are too large to achieve, September offers a lower pressure context in which to implement small change. Small change is good! Small change is, they say, where it all happens. Ten-minute workouts. Going to bed an hour earlier. Being more open to popular life hacks such as, “keep a gratitude journal” (no).
If it feels like deckchairs on the Titanic, given the way the world is right now, we can control only what we can control. Will a collapse in the bond market crash all our futures, if the climate crisis doesn’t get us first? While I think about that, there’s a small chance that if I chip off the crust around the base of the kitchen tap, clear the drift of receipts from the bottom of my bag and put flaxseed into everything I eat, maybe all will be well.
