Tag: Seasons

Still Walking: What Focus Looks Like When Everything Else Changes

Summer meant the move. Fall means looking forward. Through both, one six-year streak — and one dog at the door — never stopped.

Earlier this week, the sun set at 8:00 PM. It won’t happen again until late April. From here, the days get shorter, the temperatures fall, and eventually the leaves do, too.

Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of summer here in the upper Midwest, and every year it seems to ask the same question: what was this season actually about? This summer, the answer was easy. The move.

It took the whole season and most of my attention. Preparing the old house, sorting through decades of our stuff and generations of family stuff, selling the house, moving, closing, learning a new neighborhood, and figuring out where the coffee maker goes. For a few months, everything else waited its turn.

Fall feels different. It turns the attention forward again, toward what comes next instead of what just got finished. New goals, new routines, winter coming, and the work of looking ahead instead of simply settling in.

Through both seasons, though, one thing never cared what I was focused on. Ginger doesn’t understand summer or fall, moves or goals. She just knows that 6 AM means walk.

She looks at me, then at the door. Back at me, then back at the door, tail wagging the whole time, as if she’s asking nicely. Then comes the stretch, front paws forward, rear end in the air, and the message changes: I’m not giving you a choice. You must walk today. If not for yourself, for me.

So we walk, now on a new path complete with strategically timed neighborhood sprinklers trying to take us out. It is not the walk we had before, but it is close enough, and most mornings, close enough is the whole point. For Ginger, there are new smells, new fire hydrants, and new trees. For me, there is the same thing there has been every day for more than six years: 10,000 steps.

Two thousand three hundred seventy-nine days, and counting. The focus keeps moving, from the move behind me to whatever comes next, but the streak doesn’t. It is just there underneath it all, the same way Ginger is at the door every morning, whether I’m thinking about a moving truck, a new goal, or nothing much at all. And we’re still walking, trying to enjoy the last moments of summer and the beginning of fall.

Saturday Routine

“I do not have a formal degree from the University of Michigan. I have something more valuable. A certificate of completion. Think of it as the Gen X version of a participation trophy.”

Last Monday, my beloved Michigan Wolverines won the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship. I have fielded the same question all week. What is your connection to Michigan? Did you go there? Are you from there?

The answer is simple. And complicated.

I do not have a formal degree from the University of Michigan. I have something more valuable. A certificate of completion. Think of it as the Gen X version of a participation trophy. I did serious post-graduate executive training there, which counts for something, at least in my mind. My uncle lived in Michigan for years and raised his family there. I gave genuine consideration to attending law school at Michigan. Unfortunately, Michigan did not give the same consideration to me. Perhaps it was my law school admissions scores. We will leave it there.

But the moment I fell in love with Michigan and its flagship university is easy to trace. My wife and I honeymooned at Mackinac Island. In nearly 25 years of marriage, we have returned to the island no fewer than 17 times. In the early years it was annual. It is woven into us in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not stood on that island and understood immediately why you would keep coming back.

So when the final seconds ran out Monday night, it was not just a scoreboard. It was something older than that. And somehow, with the college basketball season now over, it feels like permission. Winter is done and spring can begin. Rightfully so, a small world is turning its attention to Augusta for a tradition like no other. The Masters is on. Saturday morning is about to change its address.

Augusta has pristine emerald fairways and perfectly manicured greens. It is the kind of green that makes you envious until you remember what Georgia feels like in July. The envy passes. My head has been somewhere else most of the week, and I am not apologizing for it.

Consider what a Saturday morning routine actually is. Not what it looks like on the surface — coffee, a dog, a tee time — but what it does. It is a standing appointment with a version of yourself. You show up to the same place at the same time, and over months and years, that consistency builds something you did not plan for. It makes you findable. Not just to yourself, but to everyone who has ever known you.

Outside of golf season, Saturday morning means Josiah’s. Same line, same order. Ginger handles public relations. I handle the coffee. She is better at her job than I am at mine. This past February, two Saturdays in a row, a former student appeared in line behind me. Same opening line both times.

“Professor Harris, I’m not sure you remember me.”

This is not a coincidence. It is not luck. It is what happens when you show up to the same place reliably enough that the people from your past know exactly where to look. I have taught roughly 1,200 students. I did not seek any of them out. I just kept showing up, and they found me. That is the quiet power of a routine that most people never think to name.

I always need a hint. I am always glad they said hello.

Golf season is a different Saturday entirely. Same day of the week, same general idea. Get outside. Move around. Spend time with people you stopped explaining yourself to a long time ago. We have been playing together for close to thirty years. There was no ceremony when that number arrived. You just look up one day, do the math, and feel briefly old before someone hits a bad shot and the feeling passes.

It is more about being outside than keeping score, but we always keep score.

Here is what thirty years of Saturday mornings with the same group actually produces. It is not a scoreboard. It is not even a friendship in the way most people define the word. It is something closer to a shared language. A set of references and rhythms that require no explanation because they were built slowly, Saturday by Saturday, across decades. You do not have to catch these people up. They were there.

Nobody on the fairway is going to tap me on the shoulder and ask if I remember them. Josiah’s is where the past finds you. The golf course is where you go to be exactly who you are right now, with people who knew you before you figured that out. Play your own game.

The line at Josiah’s will be there in October. Same order. Winter will come back, the courses will close, and Saturday morning will find its way back inside. There will probably be another former student behind me in line who is not sure I remember them. I will. I always need a hint, but I remember. That is what the line is for. Showing up to the same place long enough that the people who once sat in your classroom know where to find you.

For now, it is almost time. The same group. The same course. The same morning light that makes me think you might actually be good at this. I am not.

Don’t tell Ginger.