Changing with the Seasons

Seasons, Reasons, and Traditions

Every time September arrives, I feel a natural urge to cleanse, pause, and consider how I want the remainder of the year to land. I definitely cleans and reflect.

I also hate it when summer ends.

I am a sun seeker who prefers to spend approximately 80 percent of her life in 80 degree weather wearing beautiful sundresses, cute workout clothes and ideally in vibrant colors. Apparently, there is also some post–Labor Day rule suggesting I should stop wearing white and pink and discontinue decorating my home in accent shades of coral and teal blue.

I will not be participating.

So, yes, I hate it when summer ends.

And I also love September.

September offers us something December cannot: the opportunity to evaluate the year before declaring it over.

The kids return to school. Summer begins to soften. The final quarter hasn’t arrived yet, and there is still enough year left to change something—to reflect, recenter, realign, and reengage.

A season is arriving to completion.

And yet the year hasn’t fully ended. For any anyone in Business Development, Sales, Management or running their own Company listening to this essay: we are not in Q4 yet, darling. So there is time left to make some decisions.

Reasons

We have all heard the saying that people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Some people enter our lives to awaken something in us. Some experiences reveal what we want and a little more of what we don’t want. Others make painfully clear what we will no longer accept.

A job can teach us what we are capable of while also showing us where we no longer belong. A friendship can be deeply meaningful and still reach its natural conclusion. A relationship can change us without being meant to accompany us forever.

And some relationships remain intact because alignment and reciprocity have demonstrated, over time, that there is still reason to stay.

I continue to choose you. You continue to teach me. We continue to grow in our individual ways. I continue to enjoy spending time with you. I continue to love you.

There are also reasons we have not yet done the thing. Let’s speak to that part as well —

Reasons we have not put ourselves out there. Reasons we keep stalling on a decision or postponing a that dream. Reasons we remain where we are even when some part of us knows it is time to move. Reasons we stay stagnant.

Most of the time, we know what those reasons are.

We simply only admit them aloud to a carefully chosen few or keep them quietly to ourselves.

Some reasons become clear only after the experience has ended. Others have been clear all along, but we weren’t yet ready to confront them.

So we search for explanations. We replay conversations. We start thinking about December when it’s only September.

Eventually, we realize that honoring why something entered our lives does not require us to keep it there.

Traditions

Traditions can be beautiful.

They connect us to our families, our cultures, our communities, and earlier versions of ourselves. They create rhythm. They give us something familiar to return to as the world and we continue to change.

Some traditions deserve to remain. The harvest is soon to come and we will replenish from the fruits of our labor. Tend to the plants, the earth, the animals, the humans around you who care about you and you’ll understand the natural rhythms of the things.

Others deserve to be questioned.

Because sometimes a tradition is a meaningful ritual passed down through generations. And sometimes it is simply something we continue doing because no one has stopped long enough to ask why.

We gather in the same places. Play the same roles. Prepare the same meals. Observe the same holidays. Follow the same rules.

No white after Labor Day. Apparently.

Traditions can ground us, but they can also become containers we have quietly outgrown. What once created belonging may eventually feel like obligation. What once brought comfort may begin to feel performative. What once reflected who we were may no longer represent who we are becoming.

Changing with the seasons, I think, asks us to become conscious about what we carry forward.

What deserves to remain?

What needs to evolve?

And what are we continuing simply because we have always done it that way?

Some traditions anchor us and some need to be reimagined.

And some have served their purpose and can be released with gratitude for what they gave us and without guilt for no longer needing them.

There may also be new traditions you choose to create for yourself moving forward without obligation or anyone else telling you what they should be.

This essay wasn’t intended to be the deepest of one. Just enough to keep your attention long enough to keep listening. September can be great time to reflect on where the hell I am as the seasons are changing.