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.
