Wake up and smell the autumn

It’s autumn now. There’s no escaping it. You know what’s next, don’t you? That’s right. Winter is coming. Autumn is so beautiful, such a gently paced, gorgeously pitched collage of all that is lovely about the world. It’s also the perfect season for sad and complicated things. For break-ups and breakdowns. For staring out the window and enjoying a quiet melancholy. For sneezing into your elbow by accident on public transport because you’re not quite prepared for that time of year yet. Seeped in a kind of sad nostalgia, autumn looks lovely, but is almost lost. That morning chill (forecasting winter) dissolves in the sunlight (hungover from summer), bringing to mind the transience of this moment right here. Right now. 

This, then, is a public service announcement. The above conditions can be deftly manipulated into a thoroughly enjoyable study of all of the things that make up the world around you. Put your study specs on. Have a look around.

Study birds in flight. Do they realise they fold over like slow-mo bed sheets? Do they realise how well they read the mood of the evening, dancing to the beat of a dwindling day? Is there one bird calling the shots or it a matter of feeling the choreography and not overthinking things?

Study the falling of dusk. Finished with the slow fades of summer, autumn takes the day and breathes darkness onto it like condensation on a window. 

Watch the little orange squares of light that are other people’s lounge rooms ping onto the black canvass.

Smell the air for smoke and other people’s dinner and wet ground and tree bark.

Notice the top third. Not the ground. Not the people you walk past or the signs designed to grab your attention. Notice the tops of the tallest trees. The telephone wires snaking through the streets. The tops of people’s houses. That’s where the history hides. 

Contemplate the word brainstorm.

Study the perfect simplicity of the hot chocolate.

Study the lovely incongruities borne of the human pretence at formality, like the man in the queue for a coffee in the middle of the city the other day wearing a suit and bouncing a tennis ball lightly against the bottom of the outside wall like a kid at recess, all the other eyes in the queue going down, up, down, up.

Concentrate on tiny, contemporary moments of levity and absurdism, like when a bloke rides a bike past you and you realise he is carrying a mattress under one arm like he might just bed down anywhere.

Enjoy, for a moment, the curious, blind, hungry enthusiasm of a dog in a new bit of park.

Concentrate on the mental leaps of logic your brain performs for you on a daily basis, like when you’re out walking and you see someone emerge from a side street but you know, from the way they’re holding their body, from their pace, from the way they twist sideways slightly, that a child or a small dog is also about to emerge from behind them.

Concentrate on the out-of-season things. The suburban swimming pool on a cold morning, steam rising up from the blue. Bare feet, but with a jumper. Sea spray on your face in the rain.

Regard, for a moment, the mutual generosity of spirit in the giving and receiving of nicknames. 

Enjoy the persistence of contextually surprising book reading. Someone reading a book while walking for ten points. Reading a book in a bar for five. At a sports match for twenty.  

Contemplate the paddle steamer, lazily cartwheeling through thick water while people on deck drink cask wine and look at the sunset. 

Remember the last time you gasped at human ability. The circus? A documentary about the building of a railway? Yesterday at work?

Listen. For what? Who knows! The life-affirming eavesdropping that is overhearing a snippet of conversation between friends, maybe. The kind of singing that happens when you walk past a stranger and they don’t think you can hear. A familiar tune made tinny in someone else’s headphones.

Keep an eye out for leaves. Crunchy ones. Sunset leaves. Skeletons. Leaves that are maps of rivers and the leaves that have pimples and bends.

Enjoy your autumn. It’s not difficult to do. Maybe you have a cold and too much work to do and maybe it’s not summer and it’s not winter and maybe you’re not on a paddle steamer in years gone by. But you’re here! Well done! Enjoy it. This has been a public service announcement.

A version of this article was published in The Big Issue. Please support The Big Issue. They're tops.