Lemonade, Back Porches, and Lazy Days (Or, What’s the Rush?)

What’s your to-do list look like today?  This week?  This month?  If you’re like most people, it reads like a Victorian novel, with never-ending lists, sentences that carry on for an entire page, and a heft and a volume that is downright intimidating.

 

Given all of this, do you often find it hard to relax, slow down, decompress?  Most of us do.  And maybe the season of summer is here to remind us–it is okay to take the foot off the gas, every now and then, to drink that iced tea or tall glass of pink lemonade.

 

Where I live, in the rural hills of east-central Vermont, there are, at this time of the year, hundreds of fireflies that appear on my property, as if by magic, when night falls.  They swoop and soar above the meadow out back, they zoom forward just outside the window, flickers in the dark.  Sometimes I just stand at the window for several minutes and watch.  Think.  Take it all in.  Slow down.

 

Summer is a time for long. lazy days, back-porch conversations, slow walks along a country road.  (Or through a city or suburban neighborhood.)   The sun is high in the sky, the air is hot, the nights warm, like velvet.  Nature itself is inviting us to take a long, deep breath.

Indeed, when it comes to stories–novels or movies, stories I read or write myself–oftentimes my favorite scenes are the interludes, the quiet moments when the action slows down, when the conflict subsides, and when the characters can take a moment and share a laid-back give-and-take, enjoy a meal, or just hang out, unhurried.  Scenes like this, which some find boring, strike me as relaxing, the narrative inviting me to join the characters and put my feet up.  To stop always being in a hurry all the time.

 

So, maybe we should take the hint.  Listen to the rhythms of the season, the warm nights, the long days, the long, languorous humming of the cicadas overhead.

Pour that lemonade, open a good book, and relax.  What’s the rush?

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike