31/08/2026
I’ve been meaning to write this for most of the day, and somehow here we are at the very end of Bank Holiday Monday.
Some people will have packed all sorts into the long weekend and others will have done very little. A day with nothing much happening can be lovely, but it can also leave a lot of space.
You make tea, pick your phone up, put it down again, find something to watch and lose interest in it, and eventually realise you’ve spent rather a lot of the day rattling around in your own head. There might be nothing particularly wrong and nothing you could even explain if somebody asked. There’s just been nowhere obvious to put yourself.
From experience, I can acknowledge that becomes far more noticeable when the dynamics of your existence have fundamentally changed. You can be doing perfectly ordinary things in a perfectly ordinary day and suddenly become very aware of what isn’t the same anymore.
And tonight we’re also sitting at the end of August.
September has always had a particular feeling for me. When I was teaching, it felt far more like New Year than January ever did. There was a whole school year ahead and a natural sense of looking forward.
We notice change more in September because there is so much around us to show it to us. The gardens and trees will change, the light will alter and eventually the temperature will follow, although after the heat we’ve just had, I doubt tomorrow morning will look particularly interested in the fact that August is officially over.
None of it starts tomorrow. Change has been happening all along.
Human change is no different. Sometimes something happens in an instant and there is a very definite before and after. Other changes are so gradual that we only recognise them when something that once consumed us no longer has quite the same hold, or we find ourselves responding differently to something that would once have pulled us straight back into an old way of being.
We notice the evidence. The transformation was already happening.
And that’s where the balance is as we move into September. We need things to look forward to. We make plans, put things in the diary and wonder what might be around the corner. But we can become so occupied with what happens next that we miss what is happening now.
A new beginning doesn’t have to mean waking up tomorrow with a different life. It can be a clearer perspective on the life that is already here, a calmer frame of mind and less need to know exactly where everything is leading.
In a little while, according to the calendar, it will be September.
There will be things to look forward to and things none of us can possibly know yet.
For now, it’s still Monday night at the end of August.
And that’s where we are. Together. ❤️
L🕊
