Changing with the seasons

A meditation on the nature of movement

Photo of an American Sweetgum leaf (please correct me if I’m wrong) taken in western Virginia about one mile east of the Cumberland Gap on my road trip home from Charleston, SC.

A journal entry from October 4th, 2024

I feel compelled to write today because I’ve not given a whole lot of time recently to unbound journaling, and sense I’ve missed out on documenting and exploring a few things I would have liked to dig into. But that’s okay because today is a new day with new possibilities and new beginnings. 

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I returned home yesterday after my first week back in Charleston following my father’s passing. I enjoyed being back in Charleston . . . I don’t think it’s a place I could ever leave. Not only do I love everything about the place itself, but some of my best friends in the world are there. And anyway, I think I prefer to cyclically rotate between locations, since I get tired of any place after more than two or three months. I like to move with the seasons. 

It’s now a little cooler in Chicago. The nights get into the 40’s and 50’s, which is, by all measures, an absolutely beautiful thing. 

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I’ve got to journal more, and I’ve got to do it in my notebooks because I simply can’t capture everything there is if I only write when I’m sitting at a cafe. I think what’s really going on here—what’s frustrating me most right now—is that I got this brand new journal from my family when I graduated college, and I recently used some of the pages for shit that I shouldn’t have used them for, and now the notebook feels ruined, and I don’t want to use it at all anymore.

I think everyone relates to this feeling. If not with notebooks, then with something else . . . You want desperately for it to be perfect, but then something messes it up, some sort of mistake, and all you want to do is take it and burn it so you can feel like it, along with your mistakes, never existed. You want a fresh start to maintain a sort of purity. 

I have this feeling with a lot of things, actually. Like my days. When I am having a good day and then do something to undermine the momentum I built, I lose my mind. Like, if I wake up, stay off my phone, get cleaned up and dressed, then down some water, and then have a good writing session at the cafe, but then, before I exercise, find myself on the toilet, scrolling through Instagram reels for a little too long, in turn wasting my dopamine on bullshit, I feel like I just uprooted what was to be a beautiful, giant tree, and want nothing more than to get to the end of the day and go to bed so I may start anew the next morning.

I find, when I’m on a roll, nothing more disturbing, nothing more frustrating than distractions—these things that take us off our righteous path.

However, we have no choice, in many cases, but to contend with them. To walk with them at our side. Only by taming them, by learning how to coexist with them and all their bullshit, and, ultimately, by accepting these ebbs and flows, may we cultivate the life we want and need.