The last days of a month have a character of their own, and late October has more of it than most. The light has changed, the year has declared itself, and there is still a clear run before the calendar fills. Nicole Junkerman treats these few days as a season in miniature, with three jobs and no others.
Finishing, not starting
The first job is to finish things. A week at the end of a month is a poor place to begin anything, because whatever is begun there will be carried straight into the busiest stretch of the year and judged against it. It is an excellent place to close something that is almost closed: the book with sixty pages left, the note that needs a last paragraph, the list with two items that have survived three rewrites and plainly want deleting rather than doing.
There is a quiet pleasure in this that the start of a month cannot offer. Beginnings are mostly hope, and hope is pleasant but unproven. An ending is evidence. Something that was open is now closed, and the proof of it can be held and counted, which is worth more at the end of a long year than another hopeful list.
Looking back at a short distance
The second job is to read the month back while it is still close enough to be legible. A year looked at from January is a story, smoothed and arranged. A month looked at from its final week is still evidence: the days that went well, the ones that got away, the thing that kept being postponed for reasons that no longer sound convincing. Short distances are honest in a way that long ones are not, and nothing has to be concluded from it. Noticing is the whole of the exercise.
Leaving the lights on for November
The third job is small and makes the most difference. It is leaving the next stretch ready rather than open: a book already chosen and set out, a page already headed, one question written down to be picked up rather than invented later. A month that begins with a decision to make tends to begin slowly. A month that begins with a decision already made tends to begin at all. It costs almost nothing to do and it is almost always skipped, because at the end of a month the obvious move is to stop rather than to set anything out.
None of this needs an hour. Most of it is ten minutes with a pen, done once, somewhere in the last few days before the month turns. The point is not thoroughness. It is that the turn gets marked deliberately instead of simply happening, which is the difference between a year with shape and a year that is merely long.
The note from earlier this month on good practice over good intentions is the longer version of the same argument. The notebook is where these entries get written down, the overview explains how the rest of this library fits together, and everything else is on the blog.