Falling in to autumn

"When summer's gone / Where will we be?"
The Doors, "Summer's Almost Gone"

We'll be here.

~

In case you had not noticed, the autumnal equinox occurred Tuesday afternoon (for those of us in North America), bringing the official start of the season of autumn. But let's face it: No one really cares about even noting the equinox itself other than dorks such as myself, so there's no reason you should have noticed. So today, Wednesday, will be the first full day of the new season worldwide.

~

The autumnal equinox is perhaps not as observed as even the vernal equinox (in March) because a) people tend to like summer, and b) the return of kids to school and the start of the fall TV season have already commenced, so people already felt like it was autumn.

~

On the news programs the person reading the weather (who may or may not actually be a meteorologist) will tend to mention when the equinox will occur, and people may glance up from putting on their makeup or drinking their coffee and nod with some vague sense that they should find that interesting, but the official shift from summer to autumn (or from winter to spring in the southern hemisphere)—that is, that very moment when the position of the earth relative to the sun is just so (i.e., the scientific stuff*)—makes so little difference in the daily lives of people that it's ultimately nothing more than a quaint bit of trivia.

From the standpoint of the changing seasons, Tuesday wasn't that much different than Monday was, nor that different than Wednesday will be; it's not as though all the leaves on all the trees dropped at 2:18 (Pacific Daylight Time) or that the temperature will suddenly drop 30 degrees (at least, not because of the change in season—climate change might bring about any number of consequences, I suppose, but even that seems unlikely)—especially here in SoCal, where actually it was warmer as autumn came in than it was during a good portion of the summer (if those aforementioned pseudo-meteorologists can be trusted with their forecasts).

It's not as though the universe flashes a light across the sky or offers some cosmological indication of when the equinox has occurred. Either you pay attention to the available information and watch the clock for that moment and choose to get a kick out of it for whatever silly reason that might be, or you get on with your day and when watching the news at night and the pseudo-meteorologist mentions that the equinox occurred earlier and now it's officially autumn you'll have a vague sense that you should find that interesting.

If we were meant to pay attention, they'd make it a holiday so we'd have the day off. Of course, given that most holidays are observed on a Monday (so we can have three-day weekends), it's more likely that Monday would have been the observance of the equinox, and thus the precise moment Tuesday would still be largely unheralded.

And that's okay. The universe keeps going whether we notice it or not.

~

* Of course, if you don't grasp that the seasons are caused by the particular way the earth orbits the sun, and more specifically by the tilt of its axis relative to the sun, then none of this is likely to make the slightest bit of sense. (And if you want to find out about that, this piece on the National Geographic site isn't bad.)

But again, the beauty of the situation is that you do not need to understand it to get on with your regular existence.