After spending a month away from DC, I'll admit: it feels good to be back. As I mentioned last month, I spent a few weeks in September with my parents in North Carolina to avoid construction at my apartment building. I then spent a week at the beach with my family and took a five day trip to Maine with a friend. After all that, sleeping in my own bed and cooking in my own kitchen and living my normal routines felt good.
One of the best parts of returning home is, I think, looking at your daily life with refreshed eyes. I renewed and adjusted a few rhythms: I found new recipes to try (cinnamon rolls from scratch), trashed my summer workout plan and made a new one, bought a headlight (no more waiting until the sun rises to run), and went all in on War & Peace and finished it.
In adjusting the regular, I also looked ahead to the rest of the year. We're entering an even more contentious political season, and I'm setting margins between the broader cultural chaos and my personal life. While it's important to stay informed and active, social media has long proven itself to not be the medium for this. I'll be deleting social media for the month and choosing thoughtful books and essays over the inevitable speculative headlines. Reading angry hot takes feels good in the moment, but it relies on opinions over facts and is a guaranteed time-waster.
And I wouldn't be approaching year end accurately without including that working for a nonprofit means big fundraising campaigns, so work has picked up again after a brief lull over the summer. An increased work load provides even more of a reason to stay off Instagram and focus on what's in front of me.
October felt like an in-between season - but what will come next is anyone's guess.
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