Ink of the Day ✒️ 200 Days to Christmas | On the Calendar's Quiet Rebellion and the Soul's Seasonal Longings 📚#WritingCulture
What if thinking about Christmas in June isn't escapism, but temporal courage?
Not all clocks measure the same time.
Some tick in the heart's seasonal rhythm, where June 10th can hold the whisper of December, where a pencil-circled date becomes a doorway to cinnamon and candlelight two hundred days away.
The question arrives unbidden: *Is it too early to think about Christmas?*
The world of deadlines says yes. Fiscal quarters demand attention. Urgency insists on its own timeline, flattening wonder into productivity metrics.
But somewhere in the quiet rebellion of daydreamers and children lives a different truth: the soul does not run on the same clock as the inbox.
This is not escapism. It is temporal courage.
The courage to plant joy long before it blooms, to let anticipation become its own form of presence. To remember that time is not a ladder but a loop, where the scent of pine needles can find you in summer heat, where memory and longing dance together in defiance of the calendar's rigid march.
Marcel Proust understood this. In his madeleine, past and present collapsed into a single moment of recognition. The taste carried not just memory but the architecture of time itself: how experience layers upon experience, creating the rich sediment of a life fully lived.
The most radical act: refusing to be tyrannized by linear time. Allowing the mind to light candles in June, to let Christmas exist not as destination but as atmosphere, as the quiet insistence that wonder belongs in every season.
This is how the soul keeps time: not by the clock, but by the heart's capacity to hold multiple seasons at once. To be fully present while remaining open to the distant magic of what's coming.
And so we find ourselves here, on this June 10th, caught between the call of summer wine and poolside shade, yet somehow already tasting the spiced air of December. The calendar says it's too early. The heart whispers it's always the right time.
And perhaps that's the deepest truth about anticipation: it doesn't take us away from the present moment. It enriches it, adding layers of meaning like sediment in the soul's archaeology.
❖ A Gentle Invitation
If you've ever found yourself transported by a seasonal memory in the "wrong" season, you know this truth. The calendar forgets what the heart remembers: that joy planted early blooms deepest.
—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann for ThinkZeit
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