The Season Changed and Nobody Told You

Seasons do not announce themselves. There is no notification. The conditions simply change, gradually enough that you do not register it, and you carry on with the practices that were exactly right eighteen months ago and are now costing you far more than they return.

I watch this constantly. Someone is doing everything that worked. The same rhythms, the same disciplines, the same amount of effort, and getting a fraction of what they used to get, and the conclusion they reach is that they are failing.

They are not failing. They are operating a summer routine in autumn conditions and reading the difference as a verdict on themselves.

This is where I want to be gentle, because the people this happens to are almost always the conscientious ones. Nobody who is careless has this problem. It takes real faithfulness to keep executing a plan long after the plan stopped fitting.

A transition also has its own weather while it is happening. The disorientation of a season changing is not the same as the difficulty of the season you are leaving or the one you are entering. It is a third thing, and it is temporary, and knowing that it is temporary is most of what makes it survivable.

You are permitted to change your practice. That is not a loss of discipline. It is discipline responding to conditions, which is what discipline was always supposed to be.

You may be doing everything right for a season you already left. That is not failure. That is a map that needs updating.