Subtle spring shifts

Using daylight saving time as a personal recalibration

Mar 29, 2026

Lately, I’ve been feeling a disconnect with straight-up advice content - it’s not to say that I won’t read something if it is related to some thoughts going on in my mind at that given time. But still, I find the same bare minimum, google-inspired information regurgitated again and again exhausting. On the flip side, I do gravitate toward advice wrapped up in storytelling, or thoughts that the writer wants to experiment with themselves, all whilst taking the reader on the journey. The air of nuance, that it isn’t a straightforward list created for engagement, is the human connection I look for, I guess.

So, in that vein, like most other people, I love a definitive marker in the year to push forward off of. It’s kind of like swimming lanes — everyone knows the little boost you give yourself pushing off the pool wall is everything to a weary body. And today, in Europe, our clocks have sprung forward - giving us an extra hour of sunshine in the evening. British summer time is here. It’s time to return to myself.

I sat and wrote a list of all the things I want to do to make myself feel a bit more like me again over coffee this morning. Sitting there reading through all twenty pointers, I realised that only a few really meant anything to me; the rest felt like shoulds, rather than wants. So I whittled it down to a handful. Half the time I think just the act of noting it down physically helps settle in your mind what is important.

— Skincare as a ritual

I used to be that girl, the one who had stacked shelves of skincare; it was, after all, the thing to spend your hard-earned money on when I started blogging in 2012. Nowadays, I have a much more refined selection of products; I’d actually go as far as to say it’s maybe swung a little too far on the lighter side.

Whilst I absolutely do not need to revisit the collector stage of my life, I do miss some of the joy that skincare brought me. Nowadays, the ritual of washing my face in the morning or the evening does not feel particularly noteworthy.

After a long winter, my skin looks a little lacklustre, I’ve all but run out of cleanser (currently surviving on tester packets), and I think this is a good opportunity to revisit how I take care of my skin again.

So I’ve just placed an order for some new bits to stock up, and add a couple of missing steps to my routine. But the important part here is the ritual of it all; my day can feel so rushed. I think everyone can relate to this, but it takes a special effort to remember to slow down a little. And this is a good place for me to start, by taking off my make-up at the end of the working day, not in a rush because I want to get into bed. To start my day with the sun streaming in, a tea and a podcast in the background, instead of ripping through the process so I can get out the door.

— A quick reprioritisation of career

I hit this year with enthusiasm. This was to be the year that I would put my career pivot first — I took an exam, booked onto skills day courses and most excitingly, got offered a part-time trainee gardener placement (my dream come true). I also put more energy into my Instagram (I did write a little about my recent struggle with being pushed into expertise), and it all felt like it was going well.

Until I realised, out of, I guess, comfort zone related fear, I started prioritising my existing career by accident - I told myself it was about money (I don’t doubt that), but a part of me knows that it is about the fear of letting go.

I’ve already seen the value of putting energy into the career pivot, so it’s time to recalibrate and push myself away from the safety net, back into the wilderness of horticulture, so to speak.

For me, that looks like prioritising my placement, finding definitive time to study for my next exam and keeping up with the latest courses, skills days and talks that would help me keep pushing the change.

— Redefining my garden

Something I noticed about being on the internet a lot is how it begins to warp your mind a little bit. It feels almost like everything, and everyone conforms to a certain way within a community - this can be a good thing, for instance, people actively speaking out about not using peat in the average garden. But also, it can dampen out your own quirks and preferences by continuously being served the same message.

The message I felt like I so heavily received was: buy, buy, buy. It’s almost like, because gardening is set so well in the natural world, that the consumerism message didn’t feel as offensive as, say, fashion might. But with every scroll, or tap onto the next story, it was simply telling me that the dozen dahlias I had potted up in my downstairs bathroom were not enough, and I should be shopping the Farmer Gracy sale or that I should be in Aldi shopping the middle aisle, even if I didn’t really need anything.

My garden to me is a sanctuary; I know it is for many others. I hated the feeling that it wasn’t enough if I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing — sowing seeds daily, buying more, and more. The garden is whatever you want it to be — it is a space personal to you, and I’m clawing back to where it should be.

So for me, I’m going to reduce the seed sowing going into late spring/early summer. I’ll be quite busy between different gardens this year, but I will continue to propagate at the right times (don’t ask me why, but I will always prefer cuttings to seed sowing, it feels so much more low-key).

But, predominantly, this garden is a space where the plan is fluid; I’ll always find something to do, but the overall priority isn’t to edit it for content. It’s to do what I enjoy: potter, relax, read, take a copious amount of photographs, investigate self-seeders and watch the birds go about their day.

— Remembering that I’m a person with more than one interest

I’ve never been particularly good at being a niche — people are not made to be just one thing. The algorithm prefers it, sure, but offline, we are actually free to throw ourselves into everything. I do think sometimes when the line between content and reality becomes blurred, that notion gets forgotten easily.

The first quarter of this year has been highly fixated on gardening, which I knew it would be — I wanted to make big moves in my career pivot. But, that isn’t all I like at all, and recently I’ve let other things slip a lot, not only in response to being online, but also whenever I feel a bit low — everything joyful goes first.

Whatever has slipped you by can be regained, even if the first step seems odd and terrifying. For me, it will be getting back into running (I never really stopped, but it’s become fairly infrequent) - and in general, movement. The gym hasn’t seen me in a while, and lifting weights became so important in my lifestyle last year. I realise now how much more energy I had.

Terrifyingly, I finished my first book of the year this weekend, which feels bizarre even to say. I’ve always loved reading, but since moving to East Kent a good few years ago, the beach lifestyle brought it back to the forefront of my mind again. Since then, it’s been a nightly routine, my go-to downtime ritual and my favourite, a great thing to do before or after a swim. So, it is strange to me that I haven’t been reading, and being reunited feels like a shift in the right direction. Prioritising that over the scroll is so incredibly important to me.

There’s so much more to list: swimming, pottering around the house, sitting in cafes for no reason but to relax and drink coffee. I’m ready to fall back into myself and remember that I’m a multi-dimensional person.

In recent years, I’ve shied away from making lofty goals or using specific markers as jump pads for good change. In my mind, I was nervous that I could be setting myself up for failure. But, honestly, sometimes the novelty is what I need. Something to kick my brain into action. So, I in turn, will be welcoming the shift in the daylight hours as a change to reset myself, much like my kitchen clock (note to self: change the kitchen clock).

Thank you for reading, allie x

Hopefully, you enjoyed this post, if you did, I would be eternally grateful if you would share/restack so I can reach more people like you.

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