Fall is Coming

It is now mid August. Summer is on its last legs. Soon we will be into fall. Within a few weeks everyone will be getting back into their busy mode. How do I know? The days are getting shorter. Even on the West Coast there are a few trees that are starting to gradually change colour. The Canada Goose/geese are starting to gather and most significantly of all - for the past ten or so days the newspaper flyers have been full of ads for "Back-to-School' specials.

For the past ten or so years, when those ads started to appear - I knew that my summer was almost over. Those ads were a reminder that I would have to start saying good bye to my west coast family and friends and head back to Ontario. There was always a sense of sadness and some anxiety as I tried to squeeze too much into my last few days on the island. I use to dread seeing those ads. It was not that I didn't want to get back to my other life. I always looked forward to those clean crisp days of falls, of playing with wool or going to the Peterborough Farmer's Market on Saturday to sell my weaving. After six or seven weeks of sleeping in a variety of beds or on the ground, I was ready to sleep in my own bed. By the time those ads started to appear, I always knew it time to get back into my routines and to see my Ontario family and friends.

This year, of course, things are different. Those advertisements telling students and their parents that they need completely new outfits, pencil crayons in more colours that the human eye can see, reams of paper (both lined and un-lined) and of course a myriad of technological devices almost guaranteed to  ensure a student's success appeared on time. And like Pavlov's dog, right on time I started to experience that sense of panic that I needed to get things done because fall was right round the corner. The appearance of those ads meant that my life was going to change - again.

It is not surprising that I had this almost visceral panic. For almost all of my life, at least from the age of five, fall meant that I had to do something. I had to go to school, work was going to start to get really busy, the kids needed stuff , people were going to have expectations of me, I was going to have travel back across Canada, I was going to have to say goodbye etc. etc. But in spite of my automatic reaction to the coming of fall - there is no need for anxiety. None of those things need to happen this year. This year I am not going back east, I don't have to say good bye to anyone. My life will not be profoundly different on September 1st than it is today. No one will expect me to do anything. And yet in spite of knowing this, I still have this sense of things undone, of opportunities missed, of the need to get really busy and do something.

Conditioning is a powerful tool. I, along with my expectations, attitudes and responses, have spent the last 67 years being shaped at least in part, by my environment and the people in it. While I know that my automatic anxiety response to the coming of fall is absurd and completely unwarranted, I can't help it. There are so many things I thought I would do this summer that I did not do. People and places that I thought I would see, grandchildren who I would see more of, or things that I would weave. I feel as if I need to get up earlier, work harder, be more active. I sometimes wonder if this sense of impending doom is just a result of my Baptist/Protestant work ethic upbringing or if I am afflicted with some mental illness (or if there is much of a difference between the two).

While it would be delightful to know that this condition is curable - I suspect it is not. I would guess that I will, to the end of my days, regret the coming of fall and of all of the things that I did not do.