In a few days, a rather strange seasonal phenomenon will begin again.
Perfectly reasonable people will open their laptops and decide that they must take their lives in hand.
A new system.
New habits.
New goals.
A new diet.
A new sport.
A new notebook.
A new method for answering the emails that already existed in June.
September arrives and suddenly there we all are, turned into little start-ups of ourselves.
You are meant to come back rested, tanned, inspired, efficient and ideally equipped with a strategic vision for the fourth quarter.
That is a great deal to ask of someone who is still looking for where they put their charger.
The imaginary great restart
September adores the vocabulary of rebooting.
Get going again.
Get moving again.
Set new goals.
Step up a gear.
As though July and August had been one gigantic system failure.
But perhaps nothing needs rebooting.
Perhaps life is not a computer.
Perhaps it is closer to an analogue radio: sometimes the signal is clear, sometimes it crackles, sometimes you lose the frequency for a few seconds.
And yet the music carries on somewhere.
You are not a version 2.0
There is one particularly tiring idea: the one according to which every pause must improve us.
Holidays are supposed to restore us.
Reading is supposed to enrich us.
Sport is supposed to optimise us.
Meditation is supposed to make us more productive.
Even sleeping ends up looking, at times, like a professional assignment complete with graphs, a score and a weekly target.
At Radio Good News, we have a slightly different hypothesis:
some things can simply feel good.
With no KPIs.
A walk can lead nowhere.
A song can teach you nothing.
A coffee can be just a coffee.
And two weeks of holiday can perfectly well end without you having discovered your true purpose while watching the sun go down behind a parasol.
That is allowed.
The problem may not be your motivation
September has a particular talent for turning the slightest slowdown into a personal failing.
Struggling to concentrate?
You need a new routine.
Feeling tired?
You ought to do more sport.
Not keen on going back into the notification tunnel?
You need to “find your motivation again”.
Or else…
you are simply a human being moving abruptly from one rhythm to another.
Which is considerably less spectacular.
And a great deal harder to sell as a masterclass.
Coming back slowly is also a way of coming back
So we could try something faintly revolutionary this year.
Not attacking September.
Entering it.
Letting a few days settle back into place.
Seeing certain faces again.
Opening the windows again.
Putting the music back on.
Accepting that we do not immediately know what we will do with the next four months.
Not every new season has to be a new chapter.
Some are just the next page.
And that is perfectly fine.
A small frequency in between
Perhaps that is also what a radio is for.
Not to transform you.
Not to motivate you.
Not to explain how to become a better version of yourself by Friday.
Simply to make a small space between the noise outside and the noise we produce ourselves.
A few slow bass lines.
A voice.
An odd track.
Three minutes during which nobody asks what you intend to achieve this year.
Radio Good News has no back-to-September programme.
The radio will carry on doing exactly what it was doing in August.
Broadcasting.
And reminding you, now and then, of a piece of information that calendars tend to forget:
you do not need to start your life over simply because September is beginning.
Breaking News:
you can enter the new season at your own speed.
Even slowly.
Especially slowly.
Radio Good News broadcasts what feels good, with no motivational syrup. Listen live →