It’s the end of August and summer’s basically over. Fall is already waiting around the corner and somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice says, “Wait, wasn’t it just January?”

I used to spiral a little when that feeling showed up. Where did the time go? What did I even do with it? Why does it feel like the year is slipping through my hands faster every year? If you’ve had that same spinning thought lately, let’s sit in it for a minute.

Here’s the thing about “Where did the time go?”, there’s no good answer to it. The time went where time goes. It became mornings and dishes and drives to work and a hundred small ordinary Tuesdays that don’t feel remarkable while you’re living them, and somehow add up to a whole season gone. I don’t think there’s a way to plan your way out of that feeling. What I’ve found instead is a way to try to make peace with it. Not acceptance in the “shrug and move on” sense. More like: looking at the year honestly, without judging it for not being what I pictured back in January.

We need to stop measuring the year by what we didn’t get to. It’s so easy to tally the unfinished list, the project we meant to start, the trip we didn’t take, the habit that never stuck. And believe me, every year there’s a lot of them. Being a dreamer will do that to you. But that list will always exist. There will always be more of it than we have time for. That’s not failure, that’s just what life looks like.

Look for what actually happened instead. Not the plan, the reality. The ordinary Tuesday moments that quietly made up the year while we weren’t looking for them. Those count. Maybe they count even more. We all know life is short. Sometimes nothing reminds us of that quite like losing someone we love, especially when it happens far sooner than we ever expected. It’s humbling. And maybe one of the best ways we can honor the people we’ve lost is to be intentional about living the life we still have.

Let the last stretch of the year be enough, even unfinished. There’s still a whole fall and winter ahead. (side note: please let the cooler weather come as I’m so tired of this heat!) We don’t have to have everything accomplished now for the year to have mattered. Nobody’s handing out a grade or getting a sticker.

I’m telling you this now instead of in December, (and working it myself), because this feeling doesn’t wait for December to show up… it shows up right here, in late August, when summer’s slipping by and school’s starting, and the year suddenly feels like it’s on a downhill slope. I’d rather meet it now than pretend it away and let it catch me off guard again in four months.

Give yourself grace for how this year actually went. Not the year you planned in January. The one you actually lived. Most likely messier. Slower in some places, faster than you wanted in others. Good days, and hard ones. Full of ordinary days that didn’t feel like anything while they were happening. All of that still counts.

You don’t have to have this figured out by tomorrow, or make peace with the whole year in one sitting. Just notice, today, that it’s okay the year didn’t go the way you pictured. Maybe that’s the whole practice… one honest breath at a time.

With love,

Mindy