On Take Offs and Landings
Musings on moving through September, a not-to-be missed evening of poetry tomorrow night in London and book now for a full day yoga workshop near Lewes to celebrate the Autumn Equinox.
You know an idea has peaked when even your estate agent’s copy has caught on. I am as all about the new year feeling of September as the next person - decades of academia has welded the year into both our singular and collective psyches in such a way that it feels close to instinct. But ideas can start to feel like a bombardment when they are coming from every direction. Even my own. And the rebel in me always quickly starts to offer up some resistance - to feel it might like to wait out the month in the loo they way I often waited out a whole term of athletics at school.
The idea of a beginning can so easily be mistaken for a line and all the rallying cries a start gun, which are fine if you get off the mark at the months beginning, if you make a tidy start. It works if your call to begin something or get back into a rhythm happens to have coincided with everyone else’s. We feel a certain smug safety when we are behaving within the bounds of the pack.
But change is not always as easy to delineate as that. Its’ boundaries can be and often are far more blurred, its form indistinct for longer than we might like it. We can often inhabit two states of being for much longer than we might feel comfortable with, in ways that feel frustratingly hard to define, especially when everyone seems to be asking us to.
The odd person can pinpoint with ease the exact moment they fall in love- bang, just like that, at first sight or in a singular moment of realisation, but love -like all verbs- is more often a morpheus thing. To start, starting something, is too.
There is a shy quality to the beginnings of ideas and endeavours. And we can all too easily quash our own projects early in the piece by trying too quickly to define them. So many ideas of mine have been ruined by an almost excessive early enthusiasm. Or by trying to give them legs to run before I really knew what shape they were taking on. Or indeed by pre-announcing them. Writers will often counsel that talking about an idea before it has taken much shape is the quickest way to kill it dead. We do better to let things percolate, to build up slowly and incrementally, to ease ourselves into a new cloak, a new practice, or even - as it turns out- a new season. No matter what the copy.
There is an economic concept known as a ‘switching cost’. Dryly defined as ‘the expenses that a consumer or a company incur when they change from one product or service or supplier to another’. It is a cost that is measured in monetary terms, but is also recognised as having a psychological or effort or time based quality too.
And we have our own. Our brains don’t and can’t act like light switches, with an on and off button moving us seamlessly from rest to activity, from sleeping to waking, from weekend to work, from holiday back to routine, from parent to lover, from daughter to friend. Transitions between states and modes take time and adjustment and the older I get, the harder I find the shift.
The clarion call of this month might be to activity and rhythm and starting, to resolutions and change and resettling, but the truth is, I need some runway. Everything now takes me a little longer in both the take offs and in the landings. Sometimes I can surprise myself and the switch has an ease reminiscent of youth - we are bouncier when young, spring back into shape more easily, our switching costs are lower. But for the mostpart I now need changes to happen at a far steadier pace, without the added pressures of an inbox full of admonishments or the measures of our internal teachers, back from their summer break and full of early year vigour. My beginnings are not always obvious anymore. Though I am not sure they ever were. Because changing between modes of being in reality is less line in the sand and more a dropping of some threads and a picking up of others, a process that can necessarily falter in moments as well as then gather steam. Which feels very much like September itself so far, with its blurring of the seasonal lines, its misted mornings but still t-shirt warm afternoons. There is now some obvious momentum - in the fast altering light, the dropping of the mercury, the early but definitely inward curl of our thinking, but still with - on occasion and maybe reassuringly - some dragging of its reticent heels.
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For anyone who is based in London or can get there easily, a last minute heads up that there is the most amazing event being hosted by The Poetry Pharmacy tomorrow night, Tuesday 10th September at the Royal Geographical Society. An evening of prescription poetry for the heart and soul with Stephen Fry- the President of Mind- and a host of celebrity guests. Tickets are still available here and for friends and family there is a 15% discount with the promotional code earlybirdpoetry. A tonic in itself and for the best of causes.
And more this month……
A CELEBRATION of THE AUTUMN EQUINOX
Join me as I teach yoga as part of a really amazing collaboration near Lewes in East Sussex. Easy to access from Lewes, Brighton or London, this will be a full days nurtuing to mark the Autumn equinox and celebrate the transition from the lighter to the darker half of the year. Dynamic and restorative yoga, a nomadic suana and plunge, glorious nutritious food and the option to add on a host of amazing treatments, this will help ease you physically and mentally in the transtions betwene seasons. If the May Day version was anything to go by the day is super generous, packed with amazing epxeriences and feels like a much longer retreat.
For more information or to book click here.