When you’re little, summer means no school, warmth, and endless carefree vacations. You grow up a bit and you fall in love with summer camp, or perhaps learn to hate it. You grow up a bit more, and get a part time summer job, and then work your hours so you can do the things you really want to, camps and friends and those summer romances. You grow more, and summer becomes a desperate attempt to earn enough money to pay for your rent, tuition, books, and food, and to still have time to enjoy the fact you’re not in school.
However, no matter how old you are, summer is one of those times that you always figure should be ridiculously fantastic. You have all these great plans, camps you are going to go to, holidays that can be planned down to the bathroom breaks, or those holidays where you just go until you stop. You might plan to hang out with your friends more, or perhaps spend more time at home. The thing is, no matter what your plans are, you always plan for it to be awesome, full of adventure, romance, or just a plain old good time.
So summer is this magical time. For me though, there has always been a mad and desperate undertone to make things perfect, because I know that soon as September hits, I can’t go back. So I’d fill up my summers with camps, church things, and showing cows. I’d avoid being home as much as possible, just because I knew this was my only chance to experience all these miraculous summer events. The longer I’d spend at home the more desperate I’d get to move on to the next summer phenomenon. By the end of August when I’d begin to realise that I only had a week or a day or a couple of hours until summer was over, and I’d have all these images of all these things I’d done over the summer floating around in my head, bumping against each other, until I’d be reduced to an unfortunate mass that didn’t ever want to leave its room. There were times when I would have given just about anything to be able to turn back the clock.
I want to believe that summer doesn’t have to be like that. That summer can just be lived for the here and now, that maybe summer, and even life, can be lived just for the heck of it. That it is possible for a person to not have to be desperate for a miracle, that it is possible for a person to live for the miracle that is the present. One of my favourite sayings is “Tomorrow’s the future, yesterday’s the past, today is a gift, that’s why it’s called the present.” Today is a gift. It’s like Christmas all over, every day, a whole new day to do what you will with it, a clean slate every 24 hours. Yesterdays over, and tomorrow hasn’t come yet, and all that junk, so technically we should all just be able to live for right now in this moment.
But that’s the thing isn’t it. As humans, as people, we just can’t do it. We always have regrets; we always look back on our lives. We live today fully aware of how our actions today will affect tomorrow. And so we can’t just live for the moment. But the past used to be the present, and the future soon will be. So maybe not living only for the moment is ok.
So this summer, I’m going to try to live for the moment anyways. Sure, I know I won’t succeed. Maybe a better way of putting it is that I’m not going to live for everything but the moment. I’ll keep the past and the future in perspective, but I’m going to live for the today’s, for the right now’s, for the little miracles of every day life.
-Kathleen Kerr
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment