January has an incredible PR team.
There’s something about turning the calendar to a new year that makes us believe anything is possible. We buy the fresh planner, choose the word, make the lists, clean out the refrigerator, sign up for the class, and decide that this is absolutely going to be the year we finally get it all together. There is an energy to January that I genuinely love. It feels hopeful.
August is different. By August, life has happened.
Some of the things that felt incredibly important in January may not matter nearly as much anymore. Plans have changed. Something we were certain we wanted may have lost its pull, while something we never saw coming may suddenly matter more than almost anything else.
Maybe the first half of this year has been wonderful. Maybe you accomplished something you had been working toward for years. Maybe you fell in love with something new, found your footing in a place that once felt uncertain, or surprised yourself in ways you never expected.
Or maybe it has been hard.
Maybe you’ve spent much of the year taking care of everyone except yourself. Maybe work took more from you than you intended to give it. Maybe the habit you promised yourself you’d keep in January disappeared somewhere around March. Maybe you haven’t been on your yoga mat in months. Or maybe nothing particularly dramatic happened at all. You arrived here knowing yourself a little better than you did eight months ago.
I think that matters.
We give January so much power because it feels like a clean beginning. Isn’t that what we’ve always been conditioned to believe? “NEW YEAR, NEW YOU!” shouted from every rooftop. Honestly, there’s nothing magical about January 1 that makes change more available to us. In some ways, I think August may be an even more interesting place to begin because we’re no longer starting with a blank page. We have information now. We know what worked and what didn’t. We know what we kept making time for and what quietly fell away. We know which things gave us energy, and which ones left us depleted. We may even know something about what we want now that we couldn’t possibly have known at the beginning of the year.
That isn’t starting over. It’s beginning again.
There’s a major difference between the two. Starting over can make it sound as though everything that came before was somehow wasted, as though we’re supposed to erase the first half of the year and take another run at getting it right. Beginning again asks something entirely different of us. It lets us bring everything with us, including the things that didn’t work, the plans that changed, the lessons we didn’t particularly want to learn, and the parts of ourselves we’ve gotten to know a little better along the way.
Yoga gives us a chance to practice this every time we step onto the mat.
Our attention wanders, and we return to the breath. We lose our balance and find our footing again. We miss a class, then another, and sometimes months pass before we finally walk back through the studio door. None of that means the practice failed. Returning is part of the practice.
I think that’s something worth remembering beyond the mat too.
We don’t have to wait for Monday, the first of the month, a quieter season, or another January to decide that something needs to change. We also don’t have to turn that decision into a complete reinvention of ourselves. Sometimes beginning again is much smaller than that. It’s returning to something we miss. Letting go of something that no longer fits. Making room for something we didn’t understand we needed until now.
So maybe the question for August isn’t “What should I have accomplished by now?”
Maybe it’s, “Knowing everything I know now, what do I want the rest of this year to feel like?”
I like that question because it doesn’t ask us to judge the first half of the year. It asks us to learn from it.
The first half of your year happened. Let it teach you. Let it change you. Let it clarify something about what you want and what you don’t. Bring all of that with you into what happens next.
You are not back at zero.
You know more now.
And you still get a say in how the rest of the story unfolds.
BEGIN. AGAIN.
August 21 through 23.