Is it that time again?

It's suddenly autumn. It's got cold, and it's dark early at both ends of the day. And I'm doing the weird organisational thing again. (Briefly, I was relieved to see that Deb Perelman at smitten kitchen also does this - then realised she has the excuse of a procrastination-inspiring book tour. No such excuse here.)

The weird organisational thing seems to happen every year, or often enough that there's a pattern emerging. It may be something to do with the September light, which is still bright but at a low angle, and highlights every single speck of dust on every vertical surface. (It may do the horizontal ones too, but I suspect I filter those out. There's only so much impending houseework you can safely become aware of at one time.) The housework urge gets rapidly transmuted into tidying up other, unrelated things - perhaps because they're not housework - and soon there are lists everywhere of unfinished projects, to-do lists, and grandiose organisational plans get written and rapidly forgotten. It may be that this is all distraction to get me away from looking at walls and cupboards until the light drops still further. If so, I suspect most years it succeeds. Looking back through my data on various computer systems at home, there's an awful lot of this stuff lying around with an October datestamp of one year or another.

This year, however, things have been a little bit different. Things are actually getting done, which is a bit freaky. (Things on a to-do list are to be done? Who knew?) The last couple of years have not been great, and this last year has been a sod, and I don't think I'm alone in that - there seem to have been a lot of people having a shitty time of it this year, and it can't just be the weather. The climate seems to have become a metaphor - how we can push systems till they break, or feel like systems are out of control because they work to a longer timescale than we do; we're not here for very long, and really know squat about what we're messing with, when it comes right down to it.

So - given that control (or at very least the illusion of it) is essential to a healthy mind, perhaps it's no wonder that the reorganisation has started with renewed zeal.