\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>very year at this time, I think of a quote from the Bible, but which I know from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, in which seven-year-old Jeanette stitches a needlepoint sampler decorated withthe inscription: \u201cThe summer is ended and we are not yet saved.\u201d We are not yet saved: no, not in this house, where I experience the back-to-school week in September far more urgently than New Year\u2019s Day as the time of year for a behavioural reset. New school year, new me, new cast-iron conviction I can put the rocky road on the top shelf after I\u2019ve used it in my girls\u2019 packed lunches and not get it down until tomorrow.<\/p>\n This is the first and most pressing item on the list: diet. Ten days out from Iberico ham night at the all-inclusive buffet in Spain, and I\u2019m still more jam\u00f3n than woman. It wouldn\u2019t have mattered 10 years ago. But you can\u2019t stuff your face with cold cuts and eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner (what? I\u2019d paid for it, am I not <\/em>going to eat it?) in middle age without triggering intense thoughts of death. And so this morning, after the drop-off: a return to the thrilling self-denial of two slices of misery bread from the health food store (fibre content: dysentery level). And a resolve to settle on a stable position re chia seeds, once and for all.<\/p>\n Also this morning, a cold, critical eye on the house after six weeks of people being in it all day. Pressing concerns include working out how to empty the chamber in the handheld vacuum and moving the leaning pile of clothes by the door to a charity shop \u2013 not a risk-free task, by the way. Shelter is so fancy these days that, like trying to offload books at Strand Books in New York, you suffer the very real possibility of being publicly shamed for having your sad castoffs from Primark rejected. On the pile, a single, bankable item \u2013 a Tory Burch shirt from back when I was trying to be someone else and a symbol of the occasional necessity of retiring one\u2019s dreams. I will never get around to selling that shirt on Poshmark. I know that now.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the same every year, this routine. Even though it\u2019s modish these days to accept that \u201cresolutions\u201d pinned to a particular time of year don\u2019t work, and we\u2019re better off tweaking our general attitude year-round, I won\u2019t give up this enjoyable period. I like a few weeks of stern reckoning. At the very least, the shortlived gusts of energy that come with them can be enough to clean the fridge and figure out where that clicking sound\u2019s been coming from. Not the smoke alarm.<\/p>\n What remains curious is that the primary impetus during these periods tends towards small, trivial home- and diet-related chores, never anything big, like that massive deadline for the massive thing that\u2019s on my mind and will somehow have to take care of itself. I know this is what we call displacement activity; the delusion that, through attention to the little things, we can get a better aerial view of What Is Really Going On. Which, in my case, for the past three months, has definitely been obscured by that pile of clothes by the door. It\u2019s also the case that doing something physical but mindless, like wiping and scrubbing or folding and sorting, can put you in the slack-line mental state that allows bigger things to jump out. And I don\u2019t mind a bit of displacement activity if it delivers the instant reward of striking one or two items off the endless mental to-do list.<\/p>\n So it goes on, Gatsby-style, year after year, as we thrust ourselves forward against waves of small obligations. Pay the cats more attention. The business pages: like, be more on top of them. Stop playing Block Blast on my phone. Have a strong word with myself about my coffee-and-snack spending. And the big one, obviously: stop putting rocky road in my children\u2019s lunches and instead, batch bake bran muffins stuffed with secret avocado and \u2013 maybe? \u2013 chia seeds. It won\u2019t last, but who cares? In the meantime, I\u2019m happy to be soothed by the vague but heartfelt conviction that putting things in Tupperware will save me.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every year at this time, I think of a quote from the Bible, but which I know from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, in which seven-year-old Jeanette stitches a needlepoint sampler decorated withthe inscription: \u201cThe summer is ended and we are not yet saved.\u201d We are not yet saved: no, not<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[9106,11664,6034,6059],"class_list":{"0":"post-19056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-brockes","9":"tag-delusion","10":"tag-emma","11":"tag-summers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}