Month-in-Review Highlights: August 2025
Me exploring the Chateau de Losse, as captured by my much more attractive spouse. Montignac, France. August 5, 2025.
I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)
Early August’s meandering in France gave me a much-needed change of routine. By mid-July, I’d gotten caught up and dragged down by work-related concerns and questions that I couldn’t resolve without some distance.
We spent our time away seeing and experiencing new things and, in general, shaking up our usual daily routines from start to finish. As a creature of many habits, I sometimes balk when life requires their near-total effacement, but not this time. I needed the shake-up and I knew it. Craved it, even.
Seeing and experiencing and learning always lights me up, even when doing so doesn’t involve a shift to my routine. When at home, I do my best when to create little miniature moments of exposure to new and different information and experiences, but travel concentrates that exposure in a perspective-shifting way.
Going away on travel always means digging out from everything that piled up while away, and I didn’t want to back out of any of my social commitments for the second half of August—community is essential, after all—so I haven’t yet had the mindspace to set next steps around how I want to adjust the second half of the year now that I’ve gotten the travel-provided distance. I’m set up well to do that thinking in September, though.
As though to prepare me for the change of seasons that September always provides, the weather in the last few days of August turned rainy and gray. It’ll flip back a few times before true autumn takes over and that gives me heart. I’m not ready for the depths of autumn (and the winter it forewarns) quite yet.