Given that the summer solstice is today at 4:50 pm Eastern, I must begin by wishing you a very happy summer. Whether you consider this midsummer, the beginning of summer, or the beginning of the journey toward summer (if you’re in the southern hemisphere), or maybe about a third of the way through a summer which started on 1 June, glad tidings of light to you.
The issue that I have, of course, is that now it’s basically winter. Now, I know I can’t think like this, it is bad for me. But it’s very difficult to avoid. I have been trying to do better but I am nothing if not a work in progress.
I think my winter experiences have been improving since I moved here but I definitely still have room to grow. Last summer, part of my strategy was thinking about things a bit like storing up all the summer vibes I can so that they can sustain me over the winter when I’m not doing summery things and there are no summer vibes. I even wrote a blog post on an unseasonably hot October day last year entitled “Storing up Summer Charge.” However, alas, I don’t think my brain actually functions like that.
I can easily relive embarrassment, anxiety, and shame but joy and peace are harder for me to feel as viscerally in memory (and I don’t think I’m alone in that). I can’t just have a really nice summer and then have a tougher time in winter but have summer memories carry me through. I have to actually do good stuff in winter, too. So I’m working on making some plans and adopting some strategies for this winter.
And there’s another downside to such an approach, on the other end. I don’t want to think about the summer as a time when I must desperately enjoy every possible moment or risk coming unraveled in the following months. I’d rather just allow myself to enjoy summer as I may. Push myself and do things, yes, but relieve myself of the urgency of needing to do, needing to enjoy.
A few months ago, I came across a poem by Lizette Reese that begins “Glad that I live am I/ That the sky is blue” and it’s been ringing in my head kind of nonstop since. Very thankfully, the past couple months have been substantially less rainy than they were last year and I have been grateful for the blue skies. And I have been challenging myself to pause when I can, look up into that blue sky, and simply be glad to exist.
Living in the moment is such a hackneyed phrase that I no longer attach any significance or feeling to it at all. But when I whisper to myself, “Glad that I live am I, that the sky is blue” while hiking or at a swimming hole or walking to the post office on a sunny day, I think I feel what supporters of living in the moment probably mean when they say it. And it makes me glad. And that is how I want to spend my summer.
Journeyman 