“When October Goes” was written by Johnny Mercer, the man behind “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” in the mid-1970s, near the end of his life, and died before he could set the words to music.
His widow held onto those unfinished lyrics for years. Eventually Barry Manilow found them and understood what he was holding. A dying man’s reflection on time, on regret, on the particular ache of watching something close quietly instead of all at once. Manilow finished what Mercer started.
I think about that unfinished quality every October because it is the one time of year most of us actually let ourselves feel an ending happening in real time. Summer is but a memory. As November arrives, it is a hop and skip into American Thanksgiving then the December holiday rush. Before we know it, January is knocking at the door. October is different. The light changes before I am ready for it.
I noticed it early one morning this week, heading to a workout. The sun was slow to yawn awake. The air had that first real edge of cold to it, the kind that was not there a week ago. Leaves were already down across the sidewalk, more than I remembered from my last walk, already curled and going brown at the edges. Nothing dramatic. Just a season closing the way seasons do, without asking permission.
Mercer’s lyrics never resolve into comfort. They sit in the loss, the way autumn asks you to sit in it too. For most of my career, I treated that kind of sitting as a mood to manage, something to get through quickly on the way to whatever came next. I do not think that anymore as I tune into the pace of seasonal change.
The Janus Plan exists because I finally understood something Mercer seemed to already know. An ending witnessed honestly is not wasted time. It is the only kind of ending that teaches you anything. Step One of the Janus Plan framework, Ponder the Past, asks you to do exactly what October does every year without asking. Stop. Notice what is closing. Let it matter, learn from it, before you turn toward what comes next.
Manilow never got to ask Mercer what he meant by every line. He had to finish the song by listening closely to what was already there, trusting that the ache in it deserved music to honestly finish the sentiment intended without fixing it.
I think that is what autumn is actually for. Not so much a mood as it is a practice. The one season that does not pretend an ending is instant. The leaves change color for weeks before they fall, cooling a little more each morning, as if reminding you that even loss deserves witness before it deserves release.
So, if October has you feeling something you cannot quite name, unfinished, aware of time in a way summer never asked you to be, I do not think that is a problem to solve.
It might be the exact threshold Janus was always standing in. One face on what is ending. One face on what is ahead. Both honest. Neither rushed.
Let October go the way it wants to go. Slowly, and on purpose.
Have a listen to both the Barry Manilow and Rosemary Clooney renditions.