Transitions

The leaves here are  past peak and falling fast. Winter waits in the wings. I feel its presence in the wind as it steals glimpses from behind the curtain. As I walked past the thermostat in the house this morning, I did a double take. One degree away from turning on the heat. I greeted the obvious metaphor with a laugh. Yes, when it gets colder, we must turn on the heat. Feel free to take a moment to groan, and then join me in the next paragraph.

I feel it on a personal level. Life has grown a little stagnant, frozen. It’s pretty common at my age. It’s not that life doesn’t present plenty of challenges and opportunities to learn, but I spent more of my days reacting than acting. Time to seek positive change, to figure out how to thaw, so to speak. I’m going to start volunteering more, for example.  I sent in my application yesterday. It's just one little thing, but I'm going to add more.

My writing has turned colder as well. Last week, I completely failed on my whole “lean, mean writing machine” concept. However, I did get a bit of good news this weekend that a short story I wrote has been accepted to an online journal. I hope to use it as a spark.  In fact, it’s encouraged me to shift gears in the couple of weeks before Nano.  Instead of playing with a work in progress that’s stalled, I’m going to go back to another piece that I think actually works better as a short story.  By playing with that story, it keeps my mind on my writing without the pressure of producing something new so close to nano month.

I also made the decision to leave the writing group I’ve been with the longest this week (various reasons, but largely the membership fee for the site was getting to me).  So, it’s another transitional time there. While I am a little sad about that, I look forward to meeting new people who might want to work together either in a critique circle or a manuscript exchange.

I don’t mind change.  Well, I’m dreading every minute of winter. But I like fall. I enjoy the process of change and the hope it holds. More than anything, I hate being cold, so I better keep moving. 

Is fall an introspective time for you? Any big changes on the way?