The Things August Gave Me

August was supposed to be my month of rest. You know, where you put down all your burdens and just relax a bit. That did not happen. Instead August turned out to be the busiest month of the year to date, which is perhaps not the best way to go about having a month devoted to rest, but apparently it is the way I do it. 

I went to Buckhorn, Toronto and Calgary. In Calgary I climbed through Reader Rock Garden, wandered through the Central Library, spent a day at Heritage Park and made it all the way to Banff and Lake Louise. I came home with photographs, stories and enough unfinished Daybook pages to prove that at some point the living had gotten well ahead of the recording. There were adventures and ordinary days, family history and new places, good meals and long walks, and somehow an incredible amount of living packed into one month.

By the end of it, I was tired. Not the pleasant kind of tired that disappears after a good night's sleep, either. My body was making it increasingly clear that there had been a cost to all that living. There were headaches and fatigue and days when very little happened because very little could happen, and eventually I had to pay attention to that whether my mind particularly wanted to or not.

And yet, I don't think August failed at rest. I think I misunderstood what I was asking of it. It certainly wasn't restful, but perhaps that wasn't the only thing I needed to learn about rest. What it did do, rather unexpectedly given how busy I was, was teach me a little more about stopping.

Not without arguing with myself first, of course. Even tired to the bone my mind can find work, or somewhere to go, or something I want to see. My body and my mind do not always agree on what I am capable of, and historically my mind has been pretty good at winning that argument. Somewhere during August that began to change. I still pushed myself, probably more than I should have sometimes, but not nearly as hard as I could have.

More often than I used to, I could look at something unfinished and decide that it could wait. The Daybook could wait. A blog post could wait. Aquafit could wait. August itself could spill over its carefully drawn boundaries and into September, and nothing terrible happened because I didn't finish everything on time. Given how much I like to make plans and then expect myself to follow them, learning to draw that line may be one of the more useful things August gave me.

September is a different kind of month for me because, if you have been following me for any length of time, you know my new year doesn't begin on January 1st. It begins on October 7th, my birthday, and I have thought of the year that way for many years. This September I'm preparing to begin my 67th year, and instead of doing the rather hit-and-miss year-end review I've done before, I decided I wanted to be much more deliberate about it.

I don't want to simply look back and make a list of what went well and what didn't. I want to know what this year actually taught me and use those lessons as fodder for my posts, my Daybook, my photography and the way I live next year. I don't want to borrow someone else's list of monthly themes this time either. I want to create my own, based on what is relevant to me and on the life I am actually living rather than the one somebody else's list assumes I should be living.

So before I began the review, I collected everything I've written this year and started putting it into some kind of order, looking for lessons learned, routines that came and went, things I tried that didn't work and things that appeared almost without my noticing them. I was looking, I suppose, for evidence of who I was this year and clues about who I want to continue to be.

That evidence has already surprised me. Parts of this year were genuinely difficult, and I don't need to rewrite them into something positive to make the year worthwhile. But when I began looking at what actually happened instead of relying entirely on how the year felt, I found something sitting right alongside the difficulty that I hadn't really expected to find there. Progress. Quite a lot of it, actually.

Maybe that is another thing August prepared me for. Rest taught me that stopping isn't necessarily giving up. Notice taught me to pay attention. Restore brought familiar parts of myself back into view, and Renew asked what I wanted to do with them. Now September is asking me to look at the whole messy collection and decide what belongs in the year ahead.

I know already that I want to carry my curiosity with me. I want to carry the permission to stop and the growing ability to listen when my body tells me something my mind doesn't particularly want to hear. I want to remember that evidence sometimes tells a very different story than feelings do, and perhaps most importantly, I want to carry something I am only beginning to understand: a difficult year and a year of remarkable progress can be the same year.

There is one more lesson from August that seems especially worth carrying with me: what fills me can also drain me. Calgary filled me. Buckhorn filled me. The wandering, the photographs, the discoveries and the stories filled me, and some of those same things left me exhausted. I don't think the lesson is that I should stop doing them. I think the lesson is that I need to become better at recognizing the cost and listening when my body says it has paid enough for now.

Sometimes being tired really is the receipt for having had a very full life, and looking back at August I wouldn't trade away most of what caused the good kind. What I would like to do differently in my 67th year is learn the difference a little sooner between that kind of tired and the kind that means I have gone too far.

I don't have to carry everything into the year ahead, only what helps me grow. September is my month to figure out what that is.

Songs of the Month

I've been trying to write this post for two days, but the words just wouldn't come. This was supposed to be a soundtrack, like those lists people create on Spotify, but there were no songs. At least, not in the way I first imagined.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized July did have a soundtrack. It just wasn't made of music. It was made of birds singing outside my window, cicadas serenading us on the hottest days, conversations that didn't really matter but somehow did, pages turning in my journal, footsteps on my walk to Aquafit, and more than one night when my brain absolutely refused to shut up.

Maybe those are the songs we carry with us anyway.

 
Looking back on a month always makes it seem much neater than it felt while I was living it. July wasn't neat at all. It kept changing direction. Just when I thought I knew what I was doing, something else would catch my attention and carry me somewhere I hadn't expected to go.

Sometimes it was creativity, or what I usually call getting side-tracked. I could lose hours moving things around on a journal page or trying one more idea for the blog simply because I wanted to see if it would work. Other days it was memories. Buckhorn, my hometown, kept calling me back this month and, once I started opening those doors, I found myself remembering things I hadn't thought about in years.

I needed those memories because for a long time I've thought of my childhood as one long sad story. This month reminded me it never was. The difficult memories are still there and always will be, but they no longer stand alone. Somewhere between remembering the bad stuff were blueberry fields, corn roasts, horses on lead reins, finding treasures at the dump, and watching bears from the safety of the car. I'd forgotten there was joy living beside the sorrow.

It was also a month that challenged me both physically and mentally. I spent time in the emergency room with a urinary tract infection, worried more than once about the way fatigue seemed to settle into my bones, and found myself wondering whether depression was quietly trying to make its way back into my life. None of those things were part of the plan, but then again, life rarely asks permission before rewriting the schedule.

Looking back now, those aren't the moments that stayed with me the most.

I remember writing Good Neighbours after witnessing a stranger being treated with cruelty. I remember finally settling into a new look for the blog after trying more templates than I care to admit. I remember giving myself Permission to Play and discovering that curiosity still has a way of leading me somewhere worthwhile.

Without meaning to, July kept circling around the same ideas. Curiosity. Kindness. Memory. Permission. I never set out to write about those things, but they kept appearing until I stopped fighting them and started paying attention.

Maybe that's all any of us are really doing—learning to notice the things that quietly make up a life. The birds outside the window become part of the morning, the walk to the Y becomes time to think, conversations stay with us longer than we expect, and old memories return when they're finally ready to be heard. Even the difficult days have something to say if we're willing to listen.

Now July is coming to an end, and August is waiting just around the corner.

I've already given August its own theme: Rest & Reset. It feels like exactly what I need because my year doesn't begin in January. It begins in October, around my birthday, and that makes August and September something different. They're not really the end of one year or the beginning of another. They're the quiet space in between, where I can catch my breath before I start dreaming about what comes next.

The planner in me knows September will be filled with ideas for the year ahead, and the creative part of me is already peeking around the corner to see what's waiting. But August doesn't have to carry any of that. It can simply be what it needs to be: a chance to rest, to notice, to restore, and to begin again a little more gently than before.

Before I can start planning another year, I need to rest and review. I want to think about what is working and what isn't, what I need instead of what I simply want, and allow things to settle into whatever new shape they are meant to take. Most of all, I want to look honestly at who I was last October and who I have become along the way.

Not every season of life needs to be filled with big moments. Sometimes the quieter seasons are the ones that help us hear ourselves again.

I think that's reason enough to slow down for a while.

Good Neighbours

There are moments in our lives that don't seem especially important at the time. They happen, we move on, and years later we suddenly realize they helped shape the adults we became.

One of those moments happened to me when I was sixteen.

It began with something my dad said. At the time I didn't understand what he meant, but his words sank deep into my unconscious and quietly became part of the person I am today.

My mother had recently become confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Overnight everything changed for our family. There were extra expenses, uncertainty, and no clear idea of what the future would look like. Our little village decided to hold a benefit dance to help Mom and Dad get through those first difficult months while they figured things out.

I don't remember much about the dance itself. I couldn't tell you what music was playing or even who was there. What I do remember is something my dad said. He looked around the hall and quietly said, "These are good neighbours."

At the time I didn't understand what he meant. I knew people had come to help us, but I didn't really see anything beyond that. They were just people from our village.

I've thought about those words off and on over the years, and it took me a long time to understand what Dad was trying to tell me.

I think he meant that being a good neighbour has very little to do with living next door to someone. It's about seeing that someone needs help and doing what you can. You don't stop to ask what's in it for you. You don't keep score. You don't expect to be paid back. You simply do what you can because someone needs a hand.

The only thing you hope is that if life ever turns against you, someone else will help you the same way. Not because they owe you anything, but because that's what good neighbours do.

Looking back now, I think that's why those words became tied to the Golden Rule in my mind: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Not because you expect them to do it, but because if you ever find yourself in need, you hope someone else has learned the same lesson.

That simple idea has stayed with me all my life. The two thoughts became almost inseparable in my mind, and together they became one of the guiding principles of my life.

I haven't always been able to help in big ways. Sometimes my health gets in the way. Sometimes all I can offer is a listening ear, a kind word, or something as simple as a drink of water on a hot day. I don't think the size of the kindness matters nearly as much as the willingness to give it without expecting anything in return.

Maybe the world has changed since then, or maybe I've simply noticed it more as I've gotten older, but sometimes it feels like we've forgotten what it means to be neighbours. We seem quicker to judge than to help, quicker to argue than to understand, and quicker to persecute than to offer a helping hand. I hope I'm wrong.

I hope there are still far more good neighbours than we hear about. After all, kindness has never been very good at making headlines. It usually happens quietly, when no one is watching. That's the point of kindness, isn't it? You do what's right because it's the right thing to do, not because anyone is watching or because you expect something in return.

Looking back now, I realize Dad wasn't just talking about the people who came to that dance. Without knowing it, he was showing me the kind of person he hoped I would become, and I've carried that lesson with me ever since.

I still believe being a good neighbour is one of the best things a person can be.

A good neighbour helps because someone needs help. If that kindness comes back one day, that's a blessing. If it doesn't, it was still the right thing to do. 

 

The Principle I Learned

A good neighbour helps because someone needs help.

• Be kind.

• Be honest.

• Listen before judging.

• Help when you can.

• Expect nothing in return.

• Appreciate the people around you.

• Forgive whenever possible.

• Respect our differences.

• Share what you have.

• Leave the world a little better than you found it.

 

Following Curiosity

Most of my walks naturally fit this month's theme without me trying to make them fit. I don't set out thinking, "I need material for the blog." I simply go for a wander or two, and the story appears.

When I looked back over the week, I realized the story wasn't really about the places I visited. I think it's about what an adventure has become for me. It isn't going to BC or Ottawa. Those were the kinds of experiences I thought of as adventures.

 These days, adventure has taken on a different meaning. It might be following my curiosity down an unfamiliar street, noticing something I'd probably walked past for years, checking on a photography project, or realizing that morning glories are appearing all over the city.

Morning glories became part of a project I hadn't expected to begin. At first they were simply beautiful flowers climbing the trees and covering the raspberry bed in the back corner of the garden. I watched them slowly smother the raspberry canes in one corner until nothing else could grow there. That's when I learned that, although beautiful, they can also overwhelm everything around them. While out on one of my walks, I came across a hedge completely covered in morning glory vines and couldn't help wondering if the same thing would happen there. I've started photographing that hedge every couple of weeks to see how the story unfolds.

 Those photographs are becoming a pictorial essay I'm calling Deadly Beauty. I never planned that project. It grew out of simply paying attention.

The same thing happened with a couple of robins. I didn't go looking for them; they found me. Anyone who has ever tried photographing robins knows they rarely stay in one place for more than a few seconds. These two seemed perfectly content to let me stand there taking photographs until I had several I was genuinely happy with. Those photographs have already become more than pictures. They've inspired a journal page and even a writing prompt. Once again, curiosity quietly opened another creative door.

 That's a very different definition of adventure, and I think many of you will recognize yourselves in it. There are so many things to see if we simply spend the time looking. I don't think these discoveries were hidden. They had probably been there all along. I just wasn't paying enough attention to notice them.

As I looked back over the week, it occurred to me that my adventures naturally fell into two groups. There were the larger adventures, like turning down an unfamiliar street just to see where it led. Then there were the smaller adventures—the discoveries that only happened because I'd made that choice in the first place.

Maybe that's the real lesson. Adventure doesn't always ask us to go farther. Sometimes it simply asks us to look more closely.

Today's adventure can be solitary and unplanned, like wandering down an unfamiliar street. Tomorrow's adventure could be shared and planned—a family meal, a movie, laughter, and time together. It is becoming clear to me that adventure isn't one thing. Sometimes it's wandering without a destination. Sometimes it's making time for the people you love. Sometimes it's both.

As I was writing about my week, I found myself thinking that my July theme of Freedom & Play has quietly been present all along. Freedom isn't just choosing a different street to walk down. It's also giving yourself permission to be curious, to linger, to photograph an empty storefront because it means something to you, and to let an ordinary Friday afternoon become part of your story.

Maybe that's the biggest change of all. I used to measure adventure by how far I travelled. Now I measure it by how closely I pay attention.

 So, dear reader, here's an invitation. You don't need to book a holiday or climb a mountain. Your next adventure might begin by taking the long way home, noticing the flowers growing on a neighbour's porch, or turning down a street you've always meant to explore. You may discover, as I have, that the farther you let your curiosity wander, the richer your ordinary days become.