Winter here isn't snow. It's rain and early dark, which sounds milder than it is. The light goes at five and takes something with it.
I've stopped fighting this. For years I treated the short days as a problem to light my way out of, every bulb on, as if I could overrule the season with wattage. Now I do the opposite. I kill the overhead light, which I've decided I hate, and live by two lamps. The room gets smaller and lower and I get sleepier earlier, and I've decided this is correct rather than a failing.
The food changes on its own. There's a pot of lentil soup on the stove most of the week from about November on, made roughly the same way each time and never written down. A bowl of oranges turns up on the table. The neighbour's lemons come over the fence whether I ask for them or not. I eat earlier, and more brownly, and I want to be indoors by dark like an animal that's heard something it can't name.
I don't think of this as a reset. I'm suspicious of the word reset. Nothing's being optimised in here. I'm just noticing what I do when the light leaves, and what I do is hunker.
There was one evening last week I'd keep if I could. Rain on the window, hard, the good kind. The soup. The lamp. I Capture the Castle open on my knee for the third or fourth time, and the cat deciding my legs were the warmest available country. Nowhere to be, no one expecting me, the dark pressing on the glass and held off by a forty-watt bulb. I didn't do anything with the evening. That was the whole point of it. There was nothing to do with it.