I felt it. I bet you did, too. Stepped outside Friday morning and there it was. The first cool breath of fall.
A lot of years, here in the Carolinas, summer just steams into October, like a dog that runs right past the tennis ball it was chasing. But this year, the seasons changed on time. The fall equinox officially happened at 9:04 Thursday night. By the next morning, like a back-door lover, summer was gone.
All the shirts in your closet? They’re now flannel. Your flip-flops have turned into boots. At the coffeeshop they put pumpkin spice in your mug whether you want it or not.
As a practical matter, in our climate-controlled lives, the seasons don’t mean much anymore. But they used to mean everything, all over the world, back in the days when the only clock was the sun.
In Mexico, the pyramid known as El Castillo casts a series of shadows on the equinox that look like a feathered serpent slithering down the side. In Malta, the Megalithic Temples are designed so that the rising sun on the equinox fills the chambers with light.
(If you’re wondering about Stonehenge, that’s more a summer solstice/winter solstice sort of place.)
The equinox is the moment when night and day are most evenly divided. In the fall, it’s the brief pause before darkness starts hogging the sheets.
We only get a couple of moments a year when the earth is actually in balance. That feels right, because so much in our lives these days feels out of whack, lopsided, sideswoggled.
There are entire industries built on keeping us in balance: between work and personal life, between mind and body, between what’s good for ourselves and what’s good for the world. I don’t know many people who feel like they live a balanced life. For most of us it feels like walking across that swinging bridge on Grandfather Mountain.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something. The earth is in balance just two days a year. Maybe our lives are meant to be a little wobbly.
You’ve probably had times when it seems like you’re lurching toward nowhere, with no real clue if what you’re doing makes any sense or has any chance to work. You trip and stumble and scrape your knees … and then all of a sudden the road is smooth, and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees.
Our planet spins and rotates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in search of just a couple of moments of balance. Those moments, when they happen, feel amazing. But maybe it helps to understand that we live in a world where balance is always the goal but rarely our condition. We’re all a little off-center, doing the best we can.
