June 21 is coming.
For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the moment when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky and holds there, briefly, before beginning its slow retreat. The word solstice comes from the Latin solstitium: sol, meaning sun, and sistere, meaning to stand still. The sun standing still. Even the language asks us to pause.
I have been thinking about that pause a lot lately.
Stonehenge at Dawn
Every year on the morning of the summer solstice, something remarkable happens in Wiltshire, England. Druids in white robes, pagans, curious travelers, insomniacs, and true believers make their way to Stonehenge in the dark hours before dawn. By 4 a.m., the crowd numbers in the thousands. By the time the first light appears on the horizon, the atmosphere is something between a ceremony and a collective held breath.
And then it happens. As the sun rises, it appears directly above the Heel Stone, creating a dramatic and symbolic moment that has drawn people to the site for centuries. A beam of light enters the stone circle exactly as its builders, working sometime between 3100 and 1600 BCE, designed it to. Given the importance in Druid culture of astronomy and the movement of the heavens, the summer and winter solstices were among the principal dates on the calendar during which Druidic practices were conducted.
Think about that for a moment. Human beings have been marking this day, this specific tilt of the Earth, this particular quality of light, for more than five thousand years. The atmosphere at Stonehenge is festive, respectful, and filled with a sense of community, as thousands gather including Pagans and Druids who conduct ceremonies to mark Litha and honor the movements of the sun.
They were doing it because they understood something that our relentlessly forward-moving culture has largely forgotten. Turning points of the year deserve to be noticed. That thresholds matter. That standing still, even briefly, is not the opposite of moving forward. It is the precondition for it.
Manhattanhenge and the Modern Threshold
You do not have to travel to Wiltshire to feel this. You can feel it in Midtown Manhattan.
Manhattanhenge, a term coined by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, occurs when the setting sun aligns perfectly with Manhattan’s east-west street grid, shining through the city’s buildings. This phenomenon happens twice a year, in late May and mid-July, bracketing the summer solstice. In 2026 it happened just days ago, on May 28 and 29 (which I missed due to my travel schedule although I recall its splendor when I first witnessed it back in 1985) and will happen again on July 11 and 12.
On the dates of Manhattanhenge, the city comes alive to watch it. People stop on the streets. They ask each other what is going on. They get annoyed, but then they get happy. Neil deGrasse Tyson has said of his fellow New Yorkers: “New Yorkers hardly ever look up. You are missing out.”
He is right. And not just about the sky.
There is something quietly radical about a city full of people, heads normally buried in smart phones and deadlines and the urgent logistics of getting from one place to another, suddenly stopping to look west at the same moment. To witness the same thing. To share a threshold.
That is what the solstice asks of all of us. Just look up, briefly, and take stock of where the light is.
The Midyear Reset
I write about this in the fifth issue of my newsletter, Past • Future • Present, on LinkedIn, and I want to say it plainly here too.
Meaningful change rarely happens right at the beginning of a year. It happens somewhere in the middle when the initial energy has worn off and the real work of figuring out what matters begins. January is the easy part. June is when things get honest.
The summer solstice is not just an astronomical event. It is an invitation.
The longest days of the year carry a particular quality of light and possibility that I have always found difficult to resist. There is more time in each day, literally, measurably more. The evenings stretch out. The world feels a little more spacious. And that spaciousness, if you are paying attention, creates a natural opening for the question most of us skip until December:
What has this year been trying to teach me so far?
Not: what have I accomplished? Not: where have I fallen short? Those are the questions of judgment. I am asking about learning. About what the first half of the year, with its surprises and its disappointments and its unexpected grace notes, has been quietly revealing about what you value, what you have been avoiding, and what you are ready to finally address.
This is Step One of The Janus Plan. I call it Ponder the Past. And I believe it is the most important step most people skip.
What the Druids Knew
The ancient peoples who built Stonehenge and oriented its massive stones toward the solstice sunrise were not naive. They were, by any measure, sophisticated astronomers and engineers who understood the relationship between the movement of the heavens and the rhythms of human life. They built a monument to the threshold precisely because they knew what thresholds were for.
A threshold is not just a doorway between rooms. It is a moment of potential transformation, a place where the past and the future meet, briefly, before one of them becomes the other. Janus, the Roman god who inspired my book, presided over exactly these moments. He was the god of doorways, of transitions, of beginnings. He had two faces: one looking backward, one looking forward. He understood that you cannot know where you are going until you have honestly looked at where you have been.
The solstice is a Janus moment. It faces both directions simultaneously. It is the peak of light before the gradual turning toward darkness. It is the fullest expression of summer before summer begins to give itself back. It is the longest day and the first day of the year’s second half.
A Practice for the Longest Days
Here is what I am doing this June 21 and what I invite you to consider.
Set a timer for five minutes. Find a window or, better, go outside. Look at whatever light is available to you: morning light, evening light, the particular quality of late June sun that falls differently from the April light and the October light. Just notice it.
Then write down three things:
What is working. Not what you planned to have working by now; what is actually working. The unexpected wins. The habits that held. The relationships that deepened. The small daily practices that turned out to be larger than they looked.
What is not. With honesty and without judgment. The thing you have been meaning to address since January. The goal that lost its energy somewhere in March and never recovered. The commitment that was right for the person you were in December but may not be right for the person you are now.
What you are ready to adjust. One thing. Not a reinvention. A recalibration. Something specific enough to act on this week.
That is the midyear reset. It is a threshold practice as old as Stonehenge, as urban as Manhattanhenge, as human as the instinct to look up at the light and ask what it means.
The Sun Is Standing Still
The solstice is almost here. The sun will rise on June 21 at approximately 4:52 a.m. at Stonehenge, and thousands of people will be there to watch it as people have been watching it for five millennia. In Manhattan, people will line up along 34th Street and 42nd Street in July, phones raised, to catch the moment the sun perfectly bisects the canyon of buildings. Both are people stopping to mark a threshold.
You do not need to be in Wiltshire or on 42nd Street to do the same. You just need five minutes, a willingness to look honestly at the year behind you, and the belief that the year still ahead is worth approaching with intention.
The light is long. The question is what you do with it.