The last day of October has an odd quality in Britain. The clocks have gone back, the evenings have closed in, and there is a general sense that the year has quietly handed itself over to something else. Nicole Junkermann has come to treat the date as a natural place to stop and take stock, not because anything in particular ends, but because the light makes it obvious that a phase has.
What a month actually leaves
Ask anyone what they did in October and the honest answer is usually vague. A few events stand out. The rest dissolves into a general impression of having been busy. That is not a failure of memory so much as a feature of how months work: most of what fills them is maintenance, and maintenance is by design forgettable. The interesting question is what survives the forgetting.
In her experience it comes down to a short list, and the list is rarely what the calendar would have predicted:
- A conversation that changed how something looked, usually unplanned and usually short.
- A piece of work that was finished rather than merely advanced, which is a different and rarer thing.
- A habit that held for four weeks and has therefore earned the right to be called a habit.
- A decision that was made slowly enough to still look sensible at the end of the month.
The part worth setting down
Everything else can be left where it is. This is harder than it sounds, because unfinished things exert a pull out of all proportion to their importance. A month's worth of half-started intentions will happily follow a person into November and sit there taking up room. Reading them over once and deciding deliberately which ones are not coming along is one of the cheapest useful things anybody can do with an hour.
There is no method to recommend here and no system to adopt. The exercise works precisely because it is informal. A page, a quiet half hour, and a willingness to be a little unsentimental about ideas that seemed good four weeks ago and have not moved since.
Towards November
What October leaves behind, at its best, is a shorter and more honest list than the one it started with. The British calendar helps. The weather has stopped pretending, the gardens have finished, and the next proper milestone is a long way off, which removes most of the temptation to start something new just because the date looks tidy.
November has a reputation for being the dullest month of the British year. Nicole Junkermann would argue the opposite. It asks very little, it offers no distractions, and it is therefore the best stretch of the year for finishing what October was sensible enough to keep.
Visit the Nicole Junkermann homepage, read more about Nicole Junkermann, see the full biography of Nicole Junkermann, or return to the journal.
