Late August slips into September with a smooth sweep. Every year, despite the usual signs - slanted light on scruffy gardens, evenings creeping into muted afternoons - September happens to the awareness like waking from a sleepwalk: I’m here, but how? Where August goes is a mystery. The fading warmth and freedom of summer - a universal, yearly betrayal - ushers in the early autumn and the academic year, making September both a wistful end and a crisp new start.

This complex sense of regret and anticipation makes September the potential ‘clean slate’ ever sought by aspiring people, scholars and goal-setters. September, it’s been said before, is the other January. The ‘slate’ recalls the flat plate written on with chalk, formerly used in schools; its cleanness, a past erased and a space yet to be filled. This image ties September to new beginnings. September is the first page of a clean notebook, waiting for life to be scratched on it with a sharp new pencil. We were all students once, and so the loss we feel at the passing of summer gives way to a sense of possibility, and the cooler temperatures invigorate the mind with the freshness of new prospects.

Historically, the start of the school year was made to coincide with the end of the growing season and the major harvest in the agricultural cycle. In summer, children were needed by parents to look after siblings and to help with physical labour, with the advent of September literally freeing them up to return to school. In our now over-developed world, the summer presents a fallow and freer time for most families, with September signifying a dreaded return to work. In this way, postmodernity has warped our understanding of what it means to be free to work and learn. The slate itself was once valued to hold the promise of an education, and the ‘clean slate’ idiom was born of the idea that people could start anew.

In 2020, amidst this pandemic that has seemingly stopped the world, September prospects seem dim and very little feels new or possible. In a time of widespread illness, mass unemployment and hindered movement, in a hobbled global economy, this summer has seemed much like the spring that preceded it: quietly stressful and uncertain. Every holiday experience has had the viral threat surrounding it on low frequency; the efforts of everyday people to wear face masks have been a constant, necessary reminder of the strange time. It has been an ostensible summer, but not the carefree one we so needed.

This September, many families face the challenge of continued remote work and learning. It is one thing to take a seat in a classroom expectantly with a clean notebook; it’s quite another to resume a place in front of a screen at home, and to muddle through schoolwork with a hunched body for long hours, in rooms meant to be resting spaces. For those physically returning to work and school, there lurks the fear that accompanies that movement, even as stepping out into the world assumes a desired return to some form of normalcy. Teachers are bracing themselves for the stricter measures and the heightened state of alert their role will require. In these ways, this September seems to present not a clean slate at all, but one covered in residue.

Yet, the world keeps turning and tilting away from the sun, and we are here, not knowing how we got here. This September looks familiar, yet seems more alien and implausible than ever. Considering ‘how we got here’ broadly implies the state of the planet and of society, both of which currently seem fractured beyond repair. This year, unrested, we resume work without any clear sense of how daily individual efforts can ever impact these massive issues.

But therein lies the possibility. There is a freedom in being able to work and learn, and the return to pursuits presents the opportunity to make work meaningful in ways not yet conceived. Our work can create and nurture communities, and improve lives through various forms of production, innovation and communication. The challenge is to recognise these possibilities and to make our work new. The world is changed from what it was, but this September can mean observing that difference plainly, and adjusting our goals in the face of it, perhaps with a view to bettering it.

September is here, however that happened, and its slate is clean if you clean it.