The real Angelenos can definitely feel the end of summer and the coming of fall. It’s significantly chillier in the morning and pumpkins appear on doorsteps, in store decorations, at café fronts. Summer dresses and shorts give way to jackets and socks in our closets and LADWP bills shrink as we actually open our windows instead of blasting the AC on. Ice lattes turn to hot lattes as summer turns to fall.

In grade school, we learned that the reason we experience seasons is the Earth’s orbit around the sun for what we call a year. When our hemisphere is turned towards the sun, we have summer and spring, and when earth shifts its tilt during its orbit away from the sun, we have fall and winter.

It’s a state of heart, not a matter of Farenheits

There is something about a change of seasons (even in the allegedly-seasonless City of Angels) that often holds more meaning for people than the physics of orbits and suns.

Often, when we take those jackets out, we remember who we were when we had last worn them. We were only starting that relationship of which we weren’t certain, and now we’re discussing moving in together.

When we put away our sandals, we can almost taste the sweet July afternoon that we had spent with our aunt and uncle in Maine, eating shrimp cocktails and sipping on spritzers.

The smell of pumpkins reminds us of how embarrassed we were last fall, asking our boss for a raise, and how much we’ve grown around asking for what we need since.

Some questions to help mark the change of seasons

So while we are still in the transitional period here in L.A., where it’s fall in the morning and at Starbucks and summer in the afternoon and at the beach, you can take some time to reflect on some summer memories and fall hopes.

Some questions to ask yourself are: what are you going to miss about summer? What smells, tastes, feelings were most delicious this summer?

What experiences this summer were especially significant for you and would follow you into fall? What experiences from this summer you’d like to let go of?

What are you looking forward to this fall? What are you dreading?

What experiences would you like to create for yourself this fall?

Take the time to sink into your reflections, old concerns and new goals that this change of seasons potentially brings up in you. Ask yourself these questions and others to allow yourself to mark this transitional period.

And if you’re doing these fall reflections while sipping on a hot Pumpkin Spice latte wearing a jacket because it’s as freezing as 75 ° (!), then you’re doing it right.

 

 

I’m Eva Patrick, one of the therapists you could see at Wright Institute Los Angeles where we offer Affordable Therapy for Everyday People!

Eva received her Psy.D. degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She embraces considerations from mostly a relational orientation, along with implementation of psychodynamic, Time-Limited Dynamic Therapy, and behavioral concepts. Eva is specifically interested in utilizing her clients’ stories of transitional periods and their perception of self (their personal myths) – as a vehicle to discover new possibilities for thought and action.

The WILA blog is brought to you by the heart and expert wordsmithing of our Blog Countess, Eva Patrick, PsyD. “My passion for blogging is tied to my appetite for practicing psychotherapy  – they both allow me to surrender to the uncertainty of life, and to find my way out through words, stories and the discovery of new ideas for doing, being and telling these stories in the world.”