It’s that time of year. Everything is up in the air and the weather, our hay-fever, and our sense of identity are all feeling more variable than the quality of a Cambridge night out. In this tempestuous celestial moment sit down for five minutes and let me, Miriam Margoram, secular-spiritualist-extraordinaire, give you some concrete categories with which to orient yourself. Pick a side, choose a cozy little box to put yourself in, and demystify the path that lies ahead.

You’re either hunter or gatherer. You either strain for a job, a grade, a word, or you forage for those very same things. If you’re a hunter, anything might be a bush with edible fruit on it – a conversation in the grass on a beautiful sunny day, a video-vortex on the internet, this entire book you’ve told yourself to read unselectively as revision. For you the secret is to stay alert – it’s all going to come in handy some day.

The hunter is all about the stats, about optimisation. It is stressful to you that your body, your tool, might not be on top form when you need to make your cheetah sprint. The thought of your own sloth ruining your chances is terrifying to you. You’re not sure if Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory is bullshit or empowering but in any case you only have one life, so you might as well believe you can make it what you want. You won’t let your physical self get off the hook either, to you, 24-hour news channel services in hotels don’t seem ridiculous, they’re simply the ideal of what you are striving towards. A reality in which you’d want to go for a 6am swim before sitting down with coffee and a bowl of grapefruit to watch a bit of CNN is plausible to you. Every daily habit is a part of the hunt, and you’re ravenous.

If you’re a gatherer, on the other hand, you sometimes join the hunt. At times it can strike you as a weakness to be sitting out, always waiting by the fire for the hunters to come home, always ready to warm their souls with a sympathetic ear and a good story. You’re too available for an impromptu study date. You need to go on your own excursions sometimes, sniffing out your tracks so that you have your own stories to tell, battle stories that belong to you, not ones you just listen to. But often, once you’re out there on your own – in the bush, or the library, or the networking event you disciplined yourself into going to – you get an inkling that, for you at least, this effort will not bring home any food. The sweetest berries you’ve ever tasted, the ones that you shared with those you cared about, were found in a thorny thicket that you carelessly thrust your arm into on the side of the homeward road. You found this food was better than anything you had tracked and killed. The essay you wrote in three hours, the chat on the street-corner that you got lost in for two, the hummus and tangerine combination you discovered on a Sunday evening: these have been your best ideas. 

Don’t get me wrong. Gatherers are no layabouts, and hunters needn't be carnivores. The crucial difference between the two is their instincts for how to satisfy their hunger. Through force and planned pursuit, or alertness and receptivity to their environment. During most of the year, you might not be able to tell one from the other at first glance. But when the drought comes, around May of every year, and appetites grow more difficult to manage, both types reveal themselves. They desperate for some sort of sign that their tracking methods won’t fail them.

Whichever category you fall under, hunter or gatherer, hold fast to your tried and tested methods. Avoid the temptation to engage in social mimicry of the food-finders around you.  In part you must do this because you have no choice. This is your nature, and to fight it would require the expenditure of unnecessary energy during these trying times in the wild. You should also stay true to your instincts because a period of ease and abundance is forecast to hit soon, around June. You will emerge with the same body, the same mind, and the same friends, and will want to do so with the feeling that you have been true and kind to all.