September + Goals

We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. We will welcome summer’s ghost
– Henry Rollins

assorted-color lear hanging decor — Photo: Chris Lawton

Can you believe it’s the first of September already? It’s been said time and time again, that time has felt even stranger during this pandemic than usual, but August truly sped by. It feels like just yesterday I was lamenting how quickly July was coming to an end and now it’s September!

Even though September is still firmly a summer month, and everyone rushes into cozy fall feels, the heat wave breaking in New York has been a palpable relief. I have been on a little staycation this past week, and allowing myself to venture outside of my apartment to enjoy and support my city. The weather has been excruciatingly beautiful the entire time and I could not be more grateful for it. These fresh breezes really add to the feeling that I’m at another fresh start, another new page, that I arbitrarily feel at the beginning of the year, the beginning of each month, and even the beginning of each week.

Maybe it’s that plus the back-to-school mood that September always puts me in, but I feel really determined to try to push forward with making myself better and doing my part to make the world better, too. Here are a few goals I’m setting for myself this month.

Meditate every day. I recently started a Calm Premium subscription thanks to a credit card perk, and I have been enjoying their “How to Meditate” course. Meditation is something I have struggled with for a really long time – 20 years, to be precise. I’ll write more about this soon, but this course has already helped me approach meditation in a different way, so I’m hopeful that I can improve my practice in a more significant way than I have in the past.
Exercise 5 times a week. One of the few good habits I picked up at the beginning of quarantine was daily exercise, thanks to my stubbornness when it comes to adhering to an arbitrary challenge. However, when the challenge ended, and the next one did, too, I found myself pretty unmotivated to work out. Add to that burnout and several anxious and depressed episodes and it’s clear how exercise fell to the wayside easily, as it usually does when a bit of chaos or depression enter my life. But I have to keep being willing to try again. Maybe exercising every day is an easier “challenge” for me to keep up with but I’ll just try to do 5 times a week this month.
Resume my blogging schedule. I miss writing here. BEDA was fun but it was a lot of work, although the obligation of daily blogging provided some needed structure at the beginning of quarantine. Since the Black Lives Matters protests have started, posting about anything else feels trivial and like a distraction. While I don’t think it’s more important that I blog, I also don’t think my blog is so important that it needs to be all about the biggest issues. So, I’ll try to resume Tuesday/Friday posting, about whatever is on my mind.
Send out some snail mail. I have a growing backlog of letters to write, not least of all because some people have written to me and I never wrote back, either because I didn’t have time or stamps or stationery or some combination of the three. But I found a set of cards with envelopes and I have stamps and that is enough. It’s time to write back to those folks and then some.
Set up at least one recurring donation. I’ll admit that charitable giving is not a habit of mine, and although I have done a lot more in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, I still am not sure great at making it a sustained habit. I hope by the end of this month, I can change that.
Hit the splits. This has been a new year’s resolution for so long that it’s almost a joke but, during quarantine, I am actually much closer to achieving front splits than I have been in a long time. By the end of this month, I’d like to comfortably get them on both sides (I favor one) and make good progress on the middle splits.

I have other general betterment goals that are ongoing, but September will really be about trying to hit these 6.

It’s a new month. A new season approaches. There’s something in the air, can you feel it? In the wake of an onslaught of tragedies, we can and must persevere to make ourselves and the world we live in better.

For fun, here’s a little playlist of songs that have been stuck in my head. Some of them are triggered by something, but many just randomly started playing in my head; see if you can guess which ones those are.