New Pens, New Routines

I have always loved September.

There is something about it that feels much more like a new year than January ever does. January is dark and cold and comes immediately after you've eaten too much cheese. September arrives after summer with that familiar sense that it's time to get organised again.

For twenty years, September in our house has meant going back to school.

New shoes. New bags. New pens. New pencil cases. New exercise books with your name written carefully on the front and handwriting on page one that bears absolutely no resemblance to the handwriting on page 73.

There were timetables to work out, uniforms to find, alarm clocks to reset. And underneath all of it, a little current of optimism.

A new year.

A fresh start.

This year will be different.

For the first time in twenty years, I don't have a child going back to school.

My youngest has finished. There are no school shoes to buy, no last-minute search for a PE kit and nobody announcing at 9pm that they need three black biros, a protractor and an A4 folder by tomorrow morning.

And yet I can still feel September doing its thing.

That little tug towards routine.

Summer is wonderful partly because normal life loosens its grip. We go away. We stay outside longer. We eat at odd times. We miss things. We abandon things. We tell ourselves we'll get back to them next week.

I think that's healthy.

We don't need to maintain exactly the same routines for twelve months of the year. There are seasons when life expands and becomes less orderly. Summer can be one of them.

But there is also something rather lovely about coming back.

And perhaps that's why September is such a good time to return to a yoga practice.

Not with a grand declaration.

Not with a punishing new regime.

Not with the idea that you have somehow failed because your mat hasn't seen much action since June.

Just come back.

One class.

One morning.

One practice.

Then another.

Yoga has always understood this better than we do. A practice isn't built by never wandering away from it. Life gets busy. Holidays happen. Enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Bodies change. Circumstances change.

The practice is in the returning.

You roll out the mat again.

You notice what feels different.

You discover that some things have disappeared surprisingly quickly and others have stayed.

You begin where you are.

There is something reassuringly ordinary about it.

I've been thinking about this more than usual because September isn't returning me to quite the same life this year. The school years in our family are over. Other things are changing too. Some of the routines that have shaped our lives for decades are beginning to shift.

Perhaps that's why I'm noticing the rhythm of September so keenly.

We need routines, but we also need to be able to change them.

We need things that give our days shape without becoming so attached to that shape that we can't cope when life moves on.

And maybe that is one of the quieter things a yoga practice teaches us.

We turn up.

We practise.

Things change.

We adjust.

We begin again.

So if your yoga practice disappeared somewhere between the first barbecue and the summer holidays, September might be a good time to find it again.

And if you've never had a yoga practice, perhaps this is your new-pencil-case moment.

A clean page.

No need to write particularly neatly.

Just start.