Pilgrims & Peasants in the Early Dark
Sipping my cocoa, listening to the soothing sound of leaves being rustled down the sidewalk by the cool evening wind, watching the bright orange leaves that are being illuminated by the streetlight behind them as they still cling on to their branches, is a pleasant distraction from the fact that it’s 5:30 p.m. and it’s so dark out.
I’d be telling a non-truth if I was to say the time-change, the early darkness with each passing day, didn’t affect me the way it does. Here we are, three weeks in, and I’m still having those days of feeling completely emptied of drive, scraped out like a pumpkin after Halloween. Even working on the things that once brought me so much joy has felt like a weighted chore.
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”
— Anne Bradstreet c.1632
Some days, I dare say it feels like it’s the entire crushing force of the very system itself pressing down on me, on all of us. Crushing like those same leaves being flattened beneath the tires of a passing car.
We must decide what’s worth sacrificing, trading for, or working on, that much has always been certain.
Everything comes at a cost, dearie.
So what do you do when you have so many different want-to’s, hopes, admiration’s, little flickers of dreams that refuse to die out, the ideas of going and doings? Especially when life itself feels more expensive than ever, simply to exist in.
Which of course it is.
That’s how time moves. Population grows, materials are consumed, manufacturing demand rises, innovation is expected, economies shift and crack and inflate, all while we’re expected to continue on with our daily routines, chores, and must-dos alongside it all. The math has never quite been in our favor, nor have the odds.
We can blame it on the time change, the seasons shifting, or maybe the moon— and if not that, then we can point fingers at one of the comets or the northern lights. We can blame capitalism, consumerism, politics, those four banker guys who started the federal reserve, better yet— founding fathers, queens, aliens, popes or elites who may or may not be lurking in the shadows, pulling strings with old winkled and tired hands.
I think it’s fair to say we all have had our fill of theories, conspiracies, and the endless buffet of overconsumption, myself included. We can accidentally waste so much of our precious time pointing fingers, hunting for the monster, disassociating, distracting, wanting someone to be held responsible for the state of this dog-eat-dog world. Or we can lose ourselves to the capitalist consumerism culture machine that can’t be stopped, can’t be slowed, and certainly doesn’t care if we’re tired.
And in that exhausted state, we forget to pick up the book with our own story in it, the one where we are the main character, not just the audience to a world that demands more and more of us.
Yet, none of this overwhelm is new.
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
— Geoffrey Chaucer c. 1370
Geoffrey Chaucer himself was no stranger to the weight of the world. Born in 1340, he lived through plagues, political upheavals, wars, and social transformations that shook England to its core. Before he ever was the “father of English literature," he grew up the son of a wine merchant, then he became a soldier, a clerk, then a customs official to a diplomat turned storyteller. A true observer of human nature.
Chaucer had a way of turning everyday people into stories worth telling: the weary, the hopeful, the foolish, the generous, and the wonderfully complicated. In his eyes, no person was too small, no struggle too trivial. And maybe that’s why his characters in The Canterbury Tales, when revisited, can feel so familiar. With its chaotic assortment of nuns, merchants, knights, millers, widows and wanderers, journeying together, not because they wanted to, but because life placed them on the same road at the same time.
Different century, same humans.
They grumbled about taxes, feared the future, told dark jokes to cope, and searched for meaning wherever they could find it. Chaucer understood the exhaustion of being alive so well that he was able to turn a band of weary misfitted travelers into a classic piece of literary history. His characters told stories not to escape their lives, but to survive them, to make sense of the misery of the world they were trudging through. And in that, we can still recognize ourselves.
They, too, were tired. They, too, felt crushed under systems larger than themselves. They, too, were trying to figure out how to move forward with too many burdens and not enough daylight.
The more things change, the more we remain the same wandering pilgrims, carrying our worries, responsibilities, and the weight of the world like an overstuffed satchel, telling stories to each other as we navigate a world that always feels a little too big.
But there's a little comfort in that, in knowing this feeling didn’t begin with us. We didn’t invent overwhelm or burnout. We didn’t invent existential dread. And we certainly didn’t invent the sensation of staring into the darkness at 5:30 p.m. wondering where the time went.
Humans, even with all our modern cleverness, are deeply old creatures at heart. We have always been trying to balance what is asked of us with what our souls can actually carry and hold onto. That’s why we adore long stories. We need them. It is coded into us as surely as eye color or blood types.
Neuroscientists, anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists all point to the same conclusion: Our brains release dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin, along with strengthening memory and connection, when we hear a long story with emotional stakes, taught lessons and journeys of self discovery. In a way, we are built for stories.
And so, we continue adding chapters, even when we think we’ve reached the end.
“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
— Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr c. 1849
Our story, yours, mine, all humanity’s, has been handed down through time with. Sure, missing pages, embellished victories, smudged out words and conflictions recollections. Yet, somehow it still persists, through centuries.
From Chaucer’s England, where weary pilgrims traded tales to survive the road, to the technicolor wonderful world that was the story about a girl from Kansas who fell from the sky, to the later retelling that dared to ask whether the wicked were really wicked, or simply misunderstood in someone else’s narrative…
Again and again, we return to these stories because they remind us that everything can change, our identity, our purpose, the very role we play in the world— and that beginnings often hide themselves inside what we believed to be endings.
Stories are how we survive ourselves, and that could be why, even now, in our modern world of screens and endless to-dos, something ancient inside us sits up and says:
Ah Yes! This is what I’m made of.
Because in every era, be it Chaucer’s travelers trudging along a muddy road to Canterbury, or two very different young women, who became friends venturing down a yellow brick road towards their destinies, while a young girl from Kansas takes her own parallel path along that very same road. We see ourselves in these characters, because in so many ways we are them. Every journey is just another story in disguise. Crafted and shaped from the real lives, real struggles, the rhythms, choices, and quiet rebellions of the everyday human life.
So here we are again, in this early-dark November, cocoa in hand, listening to leaves scrape the pavement. Some seasons are abundant, bright and full of drive, and some are slower, quieter, heavier even. Neither is wrong. Neither is failure.
We simply forget that we, too, are part of the natural world and part of our own story.
So if you’re overwhelmed and tired, if you’re burnt out and slowing down, if you’re feeling unmotivated and weary, if you’re longing for meaning in a world that feels too fast and heavier than it used to— it’s okay. This isn’t a modern flaw.
It’s a human inheritance.
One that connects us to everyone who came before us and everyone who will come after. One that reminds us that even when the daylight disappears sooner than we’d like, that we’re just in a different chapter of the same ancient human tale and there is always another chapter waiting to be written. Always a story trying to begin again.
And the light will return.
If you’re wanting to trudge through your own muddy path of knowledge, you may find these resources helpful along the way:
