the other new year

My birthday has always arrived at exactly the right time of year.

Right on the cusp of September.

Summer is beginning to loosen its grip. The evenings are getting shorter. Mornings occasionally require a sweater. School supplies have taken over entire sections of stores and everyone is starting to remember that eventually we will have to know what day of the week it is again.

My Virgo heart loves all of this.

I love summer. I love the long evenings and eating outside and days that don’t seem particularly concerned with what time it is.

But somewhere around the end of August, I start wanting my life back.

Not because it went anywhere.

It just got a little loose around the edges.

September brings structure back.

School starts. Activities resume. Calendars fill in. Dinner happens at a reasonable hour again. We remember the routines that somehow seemed completely unnecessary six weeks earlier.

There is a collective sense of: okay, here we go.

And every year, right before all of that happens, I have a birthday.

I have always thought of September as another New Year, but perhaps for me it has never really been the other one.

It is the beginning of my year.

A Different Kind of Beginning

January has never held quite the same appeal for me.

January arrives with demands.

New year. New you.

Set the goals. Make the plan. Fix your habits. Organize the house. Join the gym. Drink more water. Spend less money. Become the person you apparently failed to become during the previous twelve months.

There is something strangely dissatisfied about the way we talk about beginnings in January.

The assumption seems to be that whatever existed before needs improvement.

September feels different.

September doesn’t ask me to reinvent myself.

It asks me to return.

Back to rhythms.

Back to routines.

Back to things that were temporarily set aside.

Back to the ordinary structures that make a life work.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked it so much.

There is a difference between wanting a new life and wanting to return to your own.

The Pleasure of Structure

Structure gets a bad reputation.

We tend to talk about freedom as though it exists in opposition to it.

No schedule. No obligations. Nowhere to be.

And there is enormous pleasure in that.

For a while.

But eventually I start missing the boundaries.

I want to know what happens on Monday.

I want things written on the calendar.

I want groceries in the refrigerator that correspond to actual meals.

I want everyone going to bed at sensible times.

I want the familiar shape of the week back.

Not because every minute needs to be productive.

Quite the opposite.

Structure gives things somewhere to belong.

Work belongs here.

Dinner belongs here.

Rest belongs here.

The things we care about stop having to compete for whatever scraps of time happen to remain.

There is comfort in knowing the shape of your days.

Maybe especially when you have had enough years to understand that a life is mostly made out of them.

Beginnings Don’t Have to Be Dramatic

We give beginnings an enormous amount of ceremony.

The first of the year.

The first of the month.

Monday morning.

Birthdays.

Anniversaries.

The beginning of a new season.

We like a clean line between what came before and what happens next.

But most of the meaningful beginnings in my life haven’t actually looked very dramatic.

They look like putting something back on the calendar.

Opening the notebook again.

Making dinner at home.

Going for the walk.

Returning to the book on the bedside table.

Cleaning off the surface that somehow became the place where everyone puts everything.

Deciding, quietly, that something gets my attention again.

Maybe a fresh start doesn’t have to mean starting over.

Maybe it can simply mean noticing that we’ve drifted a little and choosing our way back.

The Things That Reinforce Each Other

I sometimes wonder whether I love September because my birthday happens at the end of August, or whether having my birthday at the end of August taught me to experience this time of year as a beginning.

Probably both.

For my entire life, the calendar has reinforced the idea that another year of my life begins at exactly the moment the world around me starts rearranging itself.

New school year.

New schedules.

New season approaching.

New notebooks, obviously.

And me, beginning another trip around the sun right in the middle of it.

There are worse things to have accidentally built into your understanding of the world.

Because I don’t experience my birthday primarily as a measurement.

I experience it as a threshold.

A small place to stand between what has been and what comes next.

Not to conduct an annual performance review of my life.

Not to produce a list of lessons learned.

Not to announce that I finally understand what matters.

I don’t.

I hope I never do entirely.

But I like having a moment that asks me to notice.

What has found its way into my days?

What have I missed?

What do I want to make room for again?

What belongs in the season ahead?

And perhaps just as importantly, what doesn’t?

My Favourite Kind of Fresh Start

Soon September will arrive.

The schedules will return.

The calendar will get considerably less charming.

Someone will need to be somewhere at an inconvenient time.

There will be lunches to make and things to remember and evenings when the freedom of July suddenly seems very appealing.

That’s part of it too.

I don’t need September to transform my life.

I don’t want a blank slate.

There are far too many things already written on mine that I would like to keep.

I just like the invitation to gather everything back in.

To look around at the life already here and put things back where they belong.

To choose its rhythms again.

To begin another season without needing to become another person.

My birthday arrives first.

And then September.

Every year, I get to begin again.

Exactly where I am.