Every year at this time, I think of a quote from the Bible, but which I know from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, in which seven-year-old Jeanette stitches a needlepoint sampler decorated with the inscription: “The summer is ended and we are not yet saved.” We are not yet saved: no, not in this house, where I experience the back-to-school week in September far more urgently than New Year’s Day as the time of year for a behavioural reset. New school year, new me, new cast-iron conviction I can put the rocky road on the top shelf after I’ve used it in my girls’ packed lunches and not get it down until tomorrow.
This is the first and most pressing item on the list: diet. Ten days out from Iberico ham night at the all-inclusive buffet in Spain, and I’m still more jamón than woman. It wouldn’t have mattered 10 years ago. But you can’t stuff your face with cold cuts and eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner (what? I’d paid for it, am I not going to eat it?) in middle age without triggering intense thoughts of death. And so this morning, after the drop-off: a return to the thrilling self-denial of two slices of misery bread from the health food store (fibre content: dysentery level). And a resolve to settle on a stable position re chia seeds, once and for all.
Also this morning, a cold, critical eye on the house after six weeks of people being in it all day. Pressing concerns include working out how to empty the chamber in the handheld vacuum and moving the leaning pile of clothes by the door to a charity shop – not a risk-free task, by the way. Shelter is so fancy these days that, like trying to offload books at Strand Books in New York, you suffer the very real possibility of being publicly shamed for having your sad castoffs from Primark rejected. On the pile, a single, bankable item – a Tory Burch shirt from back when I was trying to be someone else and a symbol of the occasional necessity of retiring one’s dreams. I will never get around to selling that shirt on Poshmark. I know that now.
It’s the same every year, this routine. Even though it’s modish these days to accept that “resolutions” pinned to a particular time of year don’t work, and we’re better off tweaking our general attitude year-round, I won’t give up this enjoyable period. I like a few weeks of stern reckoning. At the very least, the shortlived gusts of energy that come with them can be enough to clean the fridge and figure out where that clicking sound’s been coming from. Not the smoke alarm.
What remains curious is that the primary impetus during these periods tends towards small, trivial home- and diet-related chores, never anything big, like that massive deadline for the massive thing that’s on my mind and will somehow have to take care of itself. I know this is what we call displacement activity; the delusion that, through attention to the little things, we can get a better aerial view of What Is Really Going On. Which, in my case, for the past three months, has definitely been obscured by that pile of clothes by the door. It’s also the case that doing something physical but mindless, like wiping and scrubbing or folding and sorting, can put you in the slack-line mental state that allows bigger things to jump out. And I don’t mind a bit of displacement activity if it delivers the instant reward of striking one or two items off the endless mental to-do list.
So it goes on, Gatsby-style, year after year, as we thrust ourselves forward against waves of small obligations. Pay the cats more attention. The business pages: like, be more on top of them. Stop playing Block Blast on my phone. Have a strong word with myself about my coffee-and-snack spending. And the big one, obviously: stop putting rocky road in my children’s lunches and instead, batch bake bran muffins stuffed with secret avocado and – maybe? – chia seeds. It won’t last, but who cares? In the meantime, I’m happy to be soothed by the vague but heartfelt conviction that putting things in Tupperware will save me.
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