Hi reader,
I just saw a weather report hinting at an upcoming week of eighty-degree temperatures and I realized – summer is here. For most of the past few years, the start of summer has come with a feeling of resignation. I’m not a huge fan of summer. I find the humidity oppressive and I don’t particularly enjoy any of the traditional summer activities. I used to like summer a lot more but I’ve recognized in hindsight that this was mostly for the vacation, a feature no longer relevant in my work-saturated life. The best part of summer for me is the signal that my favorite season, fall, is coming soon, and with it everything I find reasonable about Boston – comfortable temperatures, a sensible amount of daylight, and relatively little wind, rain, or snow.
This week, though, I haven’t noticed my usual response to the change of season. For whatever reason, things just seem a little different right now than usual. As I mull this over, I'm realizing that things have been different for a few months because my experience of spring was also quite different to what I'm accustomed. As much as I dislike summer, it has never had any comparison to spring. But although I’ve almost always hated spring, these past couple of months went by without my usual negative feeling.
I’m sure an armchair psychologist and I could spend a fun afternoon figuring this one out. I moved from Japan when I was six, a springtime migration that perhaps was traumatic enough to forever change my perception of the season. I grew up playing baseball in the spring, a sport I don’t exactly remember disliking yet also obviously not basketball, a sport I definitely liked that I played in every season – except spring. School always ended in spring and I’ve never handled endings very well, dwelling as I do on rearview mirrors rather than on the new roads ahead. Then there is the decade or so of adult life when spring seemed to attract bad luck and misfortune – an injury one year, my mom getting sicker and sicker in another, the lowest days of unemployment in a third. When it comes to spring, I’ve found that just writing it off and keeping my feet moving in the right direction was always the healthiest available approach.
This year, spring was different. Spring was… fine. Not great, just fine. No major problems, no mood management, nothing to include in the preceding paragraph when I rewrite it a year from now. There was a brief wobble, I suppose, in early May, but for once I acknowledged rather than suppressed it and I corrected course relatively quickly. By the time I got into June, I had recognized my new and improved experience of spring. There were even moments in the past month when I admitted I was enjoying myself.
As always, I had to wonder what was different about this year that led to this change. I stumbled onto my answer just last night when I was having dinner with a friend. We were exchanging various life updates about changes to our routines when I blurted out without premeditation that it was always a good feeling to ‘get back to the basics’. In this context, I meant the habits, hobbies, and interests that I knew I liked yet for some reason I had stopped doing. It’s always weird to me, I added last night, that I manage to forget about these basics despite knowing with absolute certainty that these basics have so often been the only thing I've been able to rely on during difficult times.
What I see now as I reflect on this unusual spring are all the little examples of how I went back to the basics. I simplified my diet, eating more regularly based on my evident signals rather than my hypothetical ideas. I started walking more, and doing so leisurely, while also finding time to sit and read outside. I restructured my workday to better align my time with my priorities and I refocused my training routine around proven core principles. I even left town, just briefly, on short trips in late May and early June. I’m not sure all of these examples are applicable to my broader point but taken together they represent a clear trend of returning to what’s worked well for me in the past.
This task has proven a little more challenging in the context of my writing. Part of the problem is that when it comes to writing, the idea of ‘back to the basics’ has less relevance because I’ve only been writing for about three and a half years. Simply put, I don’t have a long history of proven methods to consider when it comes to my writing. In my mind, though, I’ve had some basic concerns that I’ve been slowly working out over the past couple of months. My guess is that things recently on TOA have emphasized the who and the what at the expense of the how and the why. I’d like to remedy that in the coming months, perhaps by reducing how much I write about specific books, and in the process finding more time to think about the goals and motivations I bring to the blank page each morning. There’s no obvious end in sight to TOA but I think it’s also fairly evident that I’ll get the most out of my effort through some other form of the craft.
It isn’t clear to me what that next step might be, however, so for the time being I remain waiting, passing the time in ways I can rely on, and reflecting on irrelevant certainties like the change of seasons. I wonder about the real significance of going back to the basics. I think the process of stripping down to only the bare requirements implies a readiness for a change, or perhaps preparation for the next step. A transition from one thing to the next is never fast or easy but time and patience eventually bring us to the threshold, a line we can step across only once. Like any crossing, it’s simplified when we bring only what we need, and like any journey it’s defined as much by what we leave behind as it is by where we end up.
