No, you were right. It is October. Perhaps you didn’t know that October is also referred to by the cognoscenti as Hand Holding Hoctober. Why? Because in the Northern Hemisphere the days are shortening and winter is approaching. A time of cold unless you have the resources to keep warm. There’s the anticipation of the Mid-Winter Festival or Christmas, as we used to call it. But for some that is just a chilly reminder that their Hand Holder hasn’t yet appeared or has already gone. They need a hand to hold.
Meanwhile in the Southern Hemisphere the days lengthen and the beach beckons. Now the need is for someone to turn a good day into a joyful one. Your Mid-Summer Festival will be a lot happier if you have a Hand Holder. Not forever but intermittently. Just now and then. There’s something innocently loving about two hands holding each other to give a sense of belonging without making it a claim of possession.
But why now? I don’t need to tell you that the world is a shaky place for all its glory and grandeur. The most distressing thing in life is regrets. We all have some. It would be a flat life that had never screwed up. Straight lines of the Roman Roads are efficient but boring. Meandering rivers with their waterfalls and waspy voles have something to teach us every gurgle of the way. The worst regret of the current age will be our inability to share. Who said “We were once what we owned; we are now what we share”? A truism not yet validated.
Sharing a hand hold is not very demanding. As Edmund Bertram said in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park “There are as many ways to love as there are moments in time.” And there are as many people in need of reassurance as there are humans still breathing. Albert Schweitzer put it together most practically “In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”
There are many ways to rekindle. Even the right sort of protest is on the table. That delightful folksinger, Phil Ochs, writing in the early 1970s must have had a prescience of what was to come when he said “You must protest, It is your diamond duty. Ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.” Phil would have been a strong supporter of Hoctober.
Time has a remarkable characteristic. It gives back what we thought we had lost. It is relentless in begging us not to begin but to continue. Time may wait for no one but it aches for all humans. It remembers the past and forecasts the future but celebrates the present. My effort to reflect the feeling: “The wise see through the fleeting call of speed and spread the things that each of us must need”.
Nobody said it better than Mother Teresa. “There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.”
Will your HOCTOBER bring someone love and appreciation?
Hold a hand and it certainly will.
And you will know it.
Good morning
John Bittleston
Sometimes a little poem expresses the ideas even better. If you have one please share it with us at [email protected].
09 October 2025
