Autumn always arrives with the quiet authority of a supervisor tapping a clipboard.
As a retired professor, I still feel that old tug of the academic calendar — the sense that a fresh term is beginning somewhere, even if only in my own mind.
Fall has a way of whispering that a new adventure is at hand, along with the familiar promise of more work, more lists, more hopeful attempts at self-improvement.
There’s always that moment when autumn suggests I might actually pull it off this time. And before the second cup of coffee has even cooled, I’m seized by the doomed conviction that this is the year I will finally get organized.
This managerial optimism is perennial and misguided — like believing the garage will clean itself if you simply glare at it. Still, in a burst of administrative bravado, I decided to schedule a performance review with my shadow.
The shadow — that long-tenured companion who remembers everything I’d prefer to forget — has only one job: follow me around.
It doesn’t need benefits or dental. But lately it’s been freelancing, showing up uninvited in traffic, in conversations with friends and, most recently, in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s, where I became briefly convinced civilization was ending because the man ahead of me was paying with a check.
A check. In 2026.
My shadow adores moments like this. It thrives on them the way raccoons thrive on unsecured trash.
Naturally, when I invited it to a performance review, it declined. My shadow prefers remote work.
It sent a note saying it was “re-evaluating its priorities,” which is shadowspeak for “I’m not coming in, and you can’t make me.”
The Trader Joe’s cashier — who has witnessed more human frailty than most clergy — assured me this was normal.
“Everyone’s shadow acts up,” she said, scanning my yogurt with the serene authority of someone who has seen every possible meltdown over reusable bags.
“It’s part of the benefits package of being human. You get mortality, imagination and the ability to lose your keys in your own pocket. The shadow comes standard.”
In that moment, she became my counselor, my confessor and my personal Oracle — the only therapist in town who accepts insurance in the form of small talk and frozen Naan.
After all, when your therapist works the express lane, you take the advice.
So instead of scolding it, I took the shadow for a walk, which is what you do with unruly things — dogs, toddlers and the parts of yourself that insist on narrating your flaws like a late-night podcast host.
We passed the elementary school, where children were drawing dragons on the sidewalk with absolute conviction. No hesitation, no self doubt, no committee meetings. Just dragons.
And I thought: There it is — the whole curriculum of adulthood in chalk.
Not outgrowing the child but giving her a ride to wherever we’re going next. Not banishing the shadow but letting it walk beside us like a slightly moody friend who knows the way home but won’t admit it.
Somewhere along the way, adulthood got marketed as a process of subtraction. Trim the fat. Cut the nonsense. Outgrow your mistakes.
But the older I get, the more it feels like the opposite — a gentle accumulation.
We carry our earlier selves the way a parent carries a child’s backpack after school: not because it’s efficient, but because it’s part of the deal.
You don’t get to drop the anxious teenager or the bewildered young parent or the middle-aged man who once tried intermittent fasting and nearly fainted in an ACE Hardware store. They all come along.
And maybe that’s fine.
Maybe maturity is just the art of carrying all our former selves without dropping any of them on the pavement.
Maybe the shadow isn’t a problem to solve but a companion to walk with — a reminder that we are, all of us, a little ridiculous and a little holy, stumbling toward home with our dragons, our grocery lists and our unreviewed shadows trailing faithfully behind.
It’s not elegant, but it’s human — and the shadow seems content to tag along, taking notes we’ll never see.
