August state of mind
Goodbye to my least favorite, non-summer month of the year.
I’m happy we’re past August. It’s my least favorite non-winter month of the year. By August, summer becomes stale. It’s hot and full of stupor. And there rarely are good movies released in August. Books and films and series all seem to wait for September to release.
That’s another part of the dislike for me: the waiting. August is ripe with this uncomfortable, expectant quality. It’s the wait for summer to end, for school to resume, for colleagues to return from vacation.
August, to me, is languid. In both senses of the word. On one hand, there can be a luxurious laziness to the month. But there’s also still this suffocating stillness in it too.
Perhaps my dislike of August is more acute this summer, because for the first time since I was a teenager, I didn’t have a typical work schedule. The last of my lecturing ended with the school year in early May. I looked at the supposedly quiet summer yawning ahead of me, and I imagined all I could accomplish between then and the end of August. Quite naïvely, I thought that I could pump out a draft a new book. Of course I didn’t manage to do that.
The workless summer did eventually unnerve me. I began arriving at places on the wrong weekday. The days felt too open, yet too short. I felt listless, unmoored and distracted, felt like my thinking lost its sharpness, as if my mind had been melted by the heat. I wrote, but I never felt like I was writing enough.
Now it’s September and I’m back in the classroom and that expectant feeling is mostly gone, even if the summer heat lingers. (Unfortunately, London is currently broiling in the hottest week of the year.) I’m re-establishing new schedules and rhythms. Yesterday, when I finally organized all my drafting for the summer into a Word doc, it totaled to 75 pages—which is obviously not entire book but certainly is more than I had thought I wrote. This, after feeling guilty throughout August for not writing enough this summer.
In the end, it comes down to perspective, sometimes stubborn, sometimes foolish. The faults I find in August, others might charge against February, or April, or November. Maybe the laziness I bristle against in August is precisely the point: to gift oneself time away from the routine madness of the year, to restore, to simply sit in the stillness. Maybe, one year, I’ll learn this lesson.
August is still too damn hot, though.