It’s the end of August and everyone around me seems to be over it. The heat, the busy busy busy…
August 2025
Everyone around me is getting sick and things are just harder to smooth over and ignore. It’s all coming to a head with everything.
It (may) help as this is the time of year that schools get ready to or are returning.
And this is when all the fall sports, the events, the meetings, everything starts back up again. And for most, there was no summer of relaxation and re-charge, it was just more of the same, to-do’s, schedules and different meetings. No wonder everyone is fried and getting sick.
Time to step back and reevaluate.
The season is shifting – more obvious in the stores, slightly obvious in the air and nature around us.
I have felt that I am always behind seasonally.
However, I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m right on time.
- Summer technically starts June 21 – yet we “start it” in the United States a month or so before.
- Winter technically starts on Dec 21 – yet once the “holidays” are over on January 1, we let January disappear into an abyss (when January is really when Winter is).
Unless you yourself are consciously paying attention, it is easy to go with what the calendar says and not with what nature says (and sometimes due to schedules and priorities, there is no choice.)
I find the Summer Season to be very challenging and I know I’m not the only one. By the time August comes around I am just ready for a break, straight up, January/ignore everyone break.
So I consider August the January of Summer. It is really intense, which can help set me up for introspection and a reset – if I’m paying attention.
I took more time than usual off (by stealth) this month, using this time to check-in, clean up and out and focus myself for the year ahead (there is the calendar year and the fiscal year – and checking in for all of them can only help – any and all check-ins can only help.)
It’s my “mid-winter” check-in (not New Year’s resolutions, don’t do those at all) in the middle of summer when I’m spun out and fried like everyone else around me.
I have spent almost all of my time this summer taking what one might think is “extreme physical care of myself”. Now it has become my new standard. Note: This “extreme physical care” is: Exercise – of any form – at least 30 minutes 4 days a week, eating a balanced 3 meals a day, drinking 5 glasses of water and getting to sleep by 11 pm. This doesn’t even come close to hitting all or any of the “things you should be doing to take care of yourself” by any stretch of anyone’s imagination.
Yet, to do these things, and to ensure I am meeting these goals, it takes extra time, extra energy and stepping away and eliminating the things that “seem normal and standard.”
Now, 90 days in, they are part of my routine (for now, until something shakes it up and makes me forget everything I learned). And the thought of adding in more (which I do want to do) leaves me exhausted and checked out.
I have found myself circling back to some things I left behind years ago (being active in a community) and I have found myself letting things go that have surprised and saddened me (though brought me peace).
Nothing new for now – no new additions. I added one thing but I had done that for so long before, it felt like slipping a cozy sweater back on. And the letting go of dreams, of ideas of who I could be, as I prioritize my physical (and therefore mental and emotional) well-being, has simplified things in my brain even more. Though there is a sadness of a path closing that I always thought would be a possibility.
It’s not more boundaries – just more understanding of where I thrive and love and where there is struggle and anxiety. Less of the stress and more of the love.
And more inward to take care of all the frazzle and stress on the outside. Making sure I don’t carry it into the fall and winter with their own anxieties and stresses themselves.