October

Embracing the season of slowing down

Art by Tijana Draws (tijanadraws.com)

I notice I’ve been holding my breath. There’s a sort of dull pressure in my lungs, air held, not fully let go when I breathe out. My jaw is clenched. I’m crouched in a squat, conscious that I shouldn’t yet embrace sitting on the floor (there are no spare chairs in this waiting room) and someone else’s child hands me a book. Read this to me, she says. I just nod, glumly, start reading. My toddler is still, a feverishly hot bundle against my chest. She has stopped crying, writhing in pain; it’s not long before she’s asleep. Her heart rate is almost 200. She will be fine — a secondary chest infection after croup, easily treated with antibiotics — but in this moment, the world is a blur and the centre of it is her, every laboured breath.

I’m trying to put words to this feeling — a heaviness, trapped in my throat. I walk to the M&S, pay for some sandwiches, past the rent-a-wheelchair stand (yes, you now must pay to use wheelchairs in this NHS London hospital, a testament to nearly 15 years of government cuts). In this moment, in this city, this hospital full of people, I feel lonely, adrift. Is my current experience painful enough to merit the intensity of what I’m feeling?

Are my feelings always too much?

October has always seemed to me to be something of a cusp: a boundary between the light and growth of the summer months, with the season of darkness that follows. Colder weather, waking before the sun, evenings in shadow. Autumn will melt into bitter winter.

But I’m resisting. I’m not ready. I want things to be blooming and growing. I want to be a ripe fruit, a flower. I want the softness, the potential of spring. I want to create. I want to plant seeds and have new beginnings. Start new projects. Hustle.

I’m not ready for this season of wintering, resting and recuperating. I try to romanticise it: the nicest knitwear, corduroy and velvet, soups. Candlelight. A reading nook. I dream of living in one of Tijana’s illustrations. I love autumn, why am I resisting it this year? What am I not yet ready to let go of, to let die back in the garden of my life? What am I not ready to put to rest?

My mind is whirring, making plans, flitting around like a squirrel collecting acorns, unsure whether to nibble or store, what to pick up and what to put down. I spend so much time dreaming that I don’t get round to doing. I’m coming up against what so many have voiced before me: how hard it is to have it all. I spend a lot of time thinking about the best time to get to sleep and wake up in order to have space in each day to write, read, learn, move, cook nourishing food, dress myself in nice, clean clothes. If I could just optimise everything, my routine, my storage, my life, things will be easier. And then when my toddler is finally in bed I feel so wiped out after a day of work and care that I end up collapsing in front of the TV or scrolling through photos of her, missing her instead of decompressing.

On the waiting room floor, an app on my phone tells me I’ve spent 9 hours in the highest ‘stress’ state. In comparison, my husband’s app says he spent 30 minutes in a state of stress. We were both in the same place, living through the same thing. I notice my ‘stress levels’ are always high when I’m caring for my toddler. Why is that, even though there is joy? Is my heart always in my mouth, or out of my body, in hers?

I think it’s because I’m resisting being in this present moment, owning my feelings. I feel a kind of sadness — October is like a kind of death. I want to look backwards or forwards, but I don’t want to be in this moment. I want only joy, but as always in life there are stresses I don’t want to own up to: the stress of moving home, friends moving away, a sick toddler, the difficulty of trying to juggle everything. I want everything but it’s such a battle to make it all happen. It’s easier to dream than to do.

But what else do we have, except this living moment, this now, breath to breath? What else can we do, except embrace the darkness and accept it with kindness?

Perhaps October isn’t just the start of the cosy season. Perhaps it’s about facing up to all the things we’ve been trying not to look at. Welcoming in the darkness. After all, it’s nearly Halloween, a time for embodying all the terrifying things in life, including monsters, death and witches. And cute ghosts. We carve up the last harvest of the season, a thread of a connection to our land we’ve otherwise lost.

I’m sat on a plastic blue chair, waiting for the nurses’ sign off. I try to loosen a breath. My toddler is still asleep on me. She has finally had a wee. Her breathing is calmer.

‘You can go home,’ one of the nurses tells me.

As I’m packing up, another nurse mutters in my direction, bracing herself for the next task: ‘I like my job, I like my job.’

‘You’re doing great’, I blurt out. ‘I’m sorry it’s so busy tonight,’ I tell her.

‘Sometimes I love my job,’ she says. She looks tired. ‘There are days I don’t even want to go home. And then there are days like this.’ She gestures, at the parents sitting on the floor with their babies, six hours in, waiting room overflowing. ‘What they don’t realise is that we’re as angry as they are.’

I want to give her a pep talk, or hug her, or commiserate angrily, or say thank you again in a more meaningful way, but my tongue is heavy and my hands are full, so I just smile and nod. I take off the remaining wires attached to my daughter, fold them up carefully and place them on the chair I’ve been sitting on.

Then I leave, hit by a welcoming blast of cold, dark air. It’s a balm after the hospital.

And now I remember that the arrival of these colder months is not a time to be afraid of the dark, but to celebrate the give and take of the seasons by gathering round the kitchen table with friends, as we might once have gathered around a fire under the stars. A time to share words of kindness and honesty, stories and laughter, over food and drink and warmth while the storm rages outside. To welcome in the opportunity to slow down and celebrate what we have.

Tonight, I create a ritual. I don’t plan it out too much; there’s a time for dreaming and a time for doing. After dinner I sit on the sofa with my toddler and we put a blanket over our knees and cuddle, watching Bluey (my husband kindly washes up and I shout out the good jokes to him). She giggles because our dog insists on getting under the blanket too. We wash off the day. Once she’s in bed, I fully switch modes: wind down time. A 5-minute meditation (this one’s called ‘letting go of the day’). I get into pyjamas and cosy socks and a huge cardigan, and I make myself a hot water bottle, a cup of sleepy tea and light a candle. I sit, by candlelight, writing. Perhaps on another night I’ll get out my quills and ink and practice writing Gurmukhi letters (I’m trying to learn Punjabi with my toddler). I get into bed and read until I fall asleep. Instead of four hours of TV (am I rooting for Sauron in The Rings of Power?!) I feel a deep sense of calm. My app tells me I am ‘restored’ instead of stressed. I’m entering the darker months feeling lighter.

My feelings seem so much bigger than everyone else’s, sometimes, but what else is there to do but to put them down in words, and cast them out beyond the stars, into the welcoming darkness?