Grab an umbrella, Reader.
It has been raining all weekend.
I’ve looked out the window more times than I can count, as though the sky might eventually say, “You know what? Fair point,” and give us one more summer afternoon.
It hasn’t.
I know fall doesn’t arrive all at once. There are weeks of small warnings. The days get shorter. The mornings feel different. Someone starts talking about pumpkin spice before I’m ready to hear about it. But this weekend felt like the moment when I finally noticed.
Summer is over.
I found myself trying to account for it. Where did those weeks go? What did I think I was going to do with them? There were things that felt far away in June that are now behind me, and things I thought I would have figured out by fall that I’m still carrying around.
Then my thoughts wandered a little further than the weather.
How did I get here?
…and it got me thinking.
That question can sound dramatic. Like I’ve wandered into the woods without a map and am about to ask a squirrel for directions. But sometimes it’s a reasonable question to ask when life has been moving faster than our ability to make sense of it.
Most of us don’t arrive anywhere in one big leap. We make a choice that seems right. We respond to something we didn’t choose. We take on a responsibility because somebody needs us. We say, “I’ll think about that when things slow down,” and then things don’t slow down.
None of those moments feels like a turning point while we’re in it. We’re just getting through Tuesday.
Then a season changes, and we realize we’ve been on a path for a while.
I see this with athletes. At the start of a season, someone might be focused on making the team, earning a starting spot, or proving they belong. Months later, they may have done the thing they set out to do and still feel unsettled. They’ve changed along the way, but their picture of what they wanted hasn’t had a chance to catch up.
Coaches can end up there, too. We get so used to looking ahead to the next practice, match, or problem that looking up can feel unfamiliar. We can spend a long time doing work that matters to us and still need to ask whether the life around that work fits us the way it once did.
I think the temptation is to make “How did I get here?” into an immediate judgment.
Was this the right choice? Am I behind? Should I be somewhere else by now?
I know I can do that. I can turn a moment of noticing into a demand for a five-year plan before I’ve even finished looking out the window.
But the question doesn’t have to carry all of that. It can be a chance to retrace the path with a little honesty. Some turns were deliberate. Some were made for us. Some things we wanted changed, and we were too busy to notice when that happened.
Maybe there’s something we’re proud of that we’ve barely acknowledged. Maybe there’s something we keep doing because it made sense two years ago, even though it feels different now. We won’t know much about where we want to go next until we give ourselves a chance to see where we are.
A few minutes ago, I checked the window again. Still raining.
I’m not sure what I expected. Perhaps one last afternoon that felt like summer, long enough to make the transition seem less abrupt.
I didn’t get one. So I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, watching the rain and trying to remember how the last few months had actually gone. Not just the plans I made for them, but the days I lived.
I think I’ll be doing that for a little while yet.
Before I let you go...If you’ve been looking up and wondering how you got here, maybe you could use a small moment to pause more often than once a week. That is part of why I created the One Day One daily mail, a brief reflection for the day in front of you. You can join me at https://news.danmickle.com/onedayone.
