Today is Saturday, September 23, 2023.
Today is officially the first day of fall. i.e. the “autumnal equinox”, when the sun’s energy is approximately balanced between the northern and southern hemispheres and the 24 hour cycle is ~ 12 hours day/night. After today the northern hemisphere will begin to tilt away from the sun, shortening the days and bringing colder weather. Historically it’s a time of harvest. It’s ingrained into our culture with that sense of celebration but also perhaps a wary eye towards the coming winter. I guess that’s also a sort of balance.
To me fall always feels like the start of a new year, still a holdover from school days when the new school year started around the first of September. Also new TV shows used to drop in the fall (“Coming this fall on {one of the Big 3 Networks}…”) back when you watched TV more as a continuous running live stream and life revolved around when your shows were scheduled (I’m only kind of kidding). This included Saturday morning cartoons so all super important to my developing kid-brain. It’s weird that all of this is totally defunct now and yet my brain is still using that basic template – fall still feels like a new start to me.
If the earth had no tilt we would have no seasons. It would be like an equinox all the time (see the above article for a far better explanation by far smarter people). The sun would be directly over the equator all the time and our climate would be essentially locked into a consistent sameness. That is kind of how adult life feels in some ways. Your job just happens year-round, television is now just a bunch of apps you watch on-demand. It’s not really worse (better in some ways) it’s just different. I think our brain is designed to think in cycles and that’s etched there deep – day/night and seasons lead to cycles in crops which leads to human culture arranging around all that and then one day we even arrange our festivals and TV shows around that cycle. 8 year old me is watching the new season of Ninja Turtles with a bowl of Lucky Charms on Saturday morning, no idea that my experience has ties to the autumnal equinox.