October is summer’s last hurrah.
The campsites are taking their tents down, the hotel prices have dropped, the evenings are drawing in, and the good television has started again. Somebody in your family has probably already said the word Christmas out loud.
And in the early hours of Sunday 25 October, the clocks go back, and we all get an extra hour. One whole hour, given to us.
And most of us will lose it without even noticing.
It gets swallowed by the washing, or the emails, or twenty minutes of scrolling that somehow turns into fifty. By Sunday evening, we could not tell you where it went. The one morning of the year when time is genuinely given to us!
So this year, I would like us to claim it before anyone else does. Decide now, while it is still weeks off, exactly what that hour is for. Write it on the calendar the way you would write a dentist appointment, because that is how it needs to be treated. An hour with your name on it!
Go Outside.
October gives us the last of the sunshine. Take your coffee out, find a spot where the light reaches you, and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin while it is still there to feel. Watch the leaves fall. On a breezy morning, the whole garden turns into a snow globe, and there is something about standing in the middle of that which grounds us. That is the centredness which comes from being outdoors, from connecting with Mother Nature and remembering that we are part of all this, not separate from it.
Summer departure
Use the hour to think back over your summer.
What have you harvested? How have you changed and grown since May? What do you know now that you did not know then?
And what about the seeds that did not come up? We all plant them. The idea that never got off the ground, the class you booked and never went to, the conversation you meant to have. Ask yourself honestly why each one stayed in the soil. Was it the wrong time, the wrong season, the wrong soil altogether? Then ask the more useful question: is this one becoming the focus of your next spring, or does it need shelving for now?
Both answers are good answers. Shelving something is a decision, and a decision is a weight off. It is the seeds we leave half-buried, neither growing nor letting go of, that quietly cost us the most.
Or spend the hour doing something purely for the pleasure of it. Walk by the sea. Explore the forest. Go and look properly at your own local area, the streets and paths you drive past every week without ever stopping. Go to the place you have always meant to go and never had the time for, because this is the one morning of the year where you cannot use that excuse.
You will notice none of these is productive, and that is the whole point. The hour is not a bonus slot for catching up. If you spend it on the jobs you are behind on, you have not been given anything at all.
Here is what I have learned from doing this. The hour itself is lovely. What lasts is the practice of deciding in advance that your own time counts. Most of us are very good at protecting other people’s time and hopeless at protecting our own. We would never cancel on a friend, yet we will cancel on ourselves at the first sign of a full basket of ironing.
I have come to think of October as a month of thankfulness. Thankful for the sun we had, for the abundance all around us, for the harvest and everything that ripened while we were busy. Say thank you for it out loud if you like. Then do the part that matters most: take those gifts inside you. The trees are doing exactly that right now, drawing everything back down into their roots to see them through. We can do the same with a good summer, holding the warmth and the light and the growing somewhere within us, so that it sustains us through the winter months.
That is the symmetry of this particular Sunday. We are moving into the dark half of the year, when the evenings close in and we naturally want to pull inwards. The clock change is the doorway. Walking through it with an hour that belongs to you sets the tone for the whole of winter.
So write it down. Tell someone, so it feels real. And when Sunday morning comes, take it.
I will be having mine in the garden with a coffee, watching the leaves come down, and I will not be feeling one bit guilty about it.
Wishing you a beautiful October,
Sally x