#128. Can We Please Have September?

Has your local grocery store started slipping holiday products onto the shelves?

And by holiday, I do not mean Halloween or even Thanksgiving. I mean Christmas and all the things that have absolutely no business appearing while August is still on the calendar.

Mine has.

Whatever happened to that delicious moment when the heavy August days turn drier and cooler, and the scent of the air shifts from summer to the first hints of autumn?

Can we please have September?

I wonder if what we’re seeing reflects another one of society's myths: that the high points are where life really happens.

Maybe you know the feeling. You get through one busy stretch and immediately start preparing for the next. You tell yourself you'll call the friend, start the project, sit in the garden, or simply enjoy where you are once things settle down. But they don’t.

At some point in our third chapter, we begin to understand something we didn’t see when we were younger: we don't have an infinite supply of ordinary days.

We're always heading toward something. Waiting for the weekend. Planning the vacation. Looking forward to the next milestone. All the Big Moments—preferably photographed, posted, celebrated, and, of course, properly marketed and merchandised.

Everything else becomes the space between. And while we're doing all that looking forward, an awful lot of actual living is happening whether we're paying attention or not.

Years ago, I wrote about liminal living—those threshold spaces when we're no longer quite where we were but haven't yet arrived at whatever comes next.

But now I'm wondering. What if much of what we call “in-between” isn't between anything at all? What if we've simply been taught to think that way because ordinary Tuesday afternoons don't come with decorations?

Most of our lives are not lived at the high points. They're lived while making dinner. Walking the dog. Talking to a friend. Reading in bed. Puttering in the garden. Looking out a window. They're lived in conversations we didn't schedule and pleasures we didn't plan.

They're lived in September.

This feels particularly important in our third chapter. We've already spent decades being pointed toward the next marker: education, career, relationships, family, advancement, achievement, retirement.

Surely by now we've earned the right to stop treating today as the waiting room for something more important. September isn't waiting for October. Tuesday isn't waiting for the weekend. Sixty-three isn't waiting for sixty-five.

Today isn't waiting for something worth celebrating. And isn’t that the myth worth challenging? That a meaningful life is found primarily in its high points.

I think it's the other way around. The richness of a life may be found in how fully we inhabit all those unremarkable moments nobody thought to put on a greeting card.

So yes, Christmas will come in due time. We even have a few perfectly good holidays to enjoy before we get there. But not yet.

First, can we please have September?

Each delicious day of it.