Creating Your Own Light

This is the warm one. We've had eight weeks of heavy weather, and the year has turned toward the harvest, so I've the Sun for you. Which is exactly where somebody in my line of work is most likely to say something useless. So here's the thing I want to be straight about. You cannot make a sun. And a fair bit of your life has gone by while you waited for one to come up, because there's a way of thinking that goes: I'll start when work settles, when I've got my energy back, when I feel more like myself. Every one of those is waiting on something arriving from outside you that changes the conditions, and you have no hand in any of it. So this episode is about the other thing. At the end of August, the women and the bairns went out to the wet ground to cut rushes. You strip the green skin off to get at the pith inside, leaving one narrow rib of green running the length of it, because without that the pith has no backbone and collapses in your hand. Then you dip it in whatever fat the household has saved in a pan by the fire. And you have light, made out of a weed from the worst bit of the field and the grease off the dinner. These things existed because a tax in 1709 priced poor people out of candles. So this is not a charming rustic craft. And they were held in an iron clip at about forty-five degrees, because too upright burns dim and too flat burns out fast. Our people built the discipline into the object rather than relying on anybody's willpower. There's also where the phrase comes from. You could light a rushlight at both ends for twice the light and half the time, and it originally meant reckless and wasteful. I don't think I need to labour that one. Then a diary study of twelve thousand entries that found the single strongest driver of a good day was making some progress on something that mattered, and that small progress worked nearly as well as breakthroughs. Along with the half of that finding nobody quotes, which is that setbacks hit two to three times harder than progress helps. And the Sun card, which has a wall in it that most people walk straight past. Next week is the one I've been looking forward to since I planned this series, and it's about the old woman who made the mountains. **This week's card:** the Sun. The sun makes no effort at all, and that isn't available to us. The wall is the interesting part. **Take the quiz** **You already know. So what are you waiting for?** Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.