Summer Reflections

Summer Reflections

Where I live, summers are not measured by the calendar so much as by holidays. Summer begins with Memorial Day and ends with Labor Day. The mid-point is marked by the Fourth of July.

The calendar does not agree of course. Summer, according to “calendarians” (is that a word?) begins on or about June 21 and ends on or about September 22 or 23rd depending on the year.

But, no matter how you measure summer, it’s the shortest season of the year;

Summer is a time when the days are long, the short nights balmy, the breezes warm, and time passes far more quickly than it does during the dark, cold days of winter. It’s a fact. I don’t care what clocks or calendars say, or what logic dictates. Time passes most swiftly when summer is here.

The older you get the faster times flies and summer makes it fly even more quickly.

Einstein’s theory of relativity gives us a deep understanding of space and time. But, it explains a lot more than just black holes, time warps, wormholes, and the relationship between energy and matter.

It explains that the passage of time is relative to how old you are and how you perceive it. Einstein once explained his theory of relativity to grade-school students this way:

An hour spent on a park bench sitting with a pretty girl seems like a minute. A minute with your hand on a hot stove seems like an hour.

Time is relative to how you perceive it, and it can be devastatingly relative if you don’t perceive it until it is too late. The closer you get to running out of time, the faster time passes. Time cannot be replaced with more time. When the sand in the hourglass runs out, there’s no more sand left.

In the summer, when soft, scattered, morning mists softly envelop the silvery-green meadows and the early morning sun rises through the thin veil of clouds to greet the dawn, I feel the sad and forlorn ghosts of summers past.

Ethereal and ephemeral as they are, I feel them walking beside me. Faintly visible images, like watermarks, difficult to discern, yet as real as the ground upon which I walk, appear and disappear in my mind. I try hard to capture and savor them but I cannot, for they are fleeting. They are evanescent misty morsels of one person’s past. My past. And, trying to recapture moments from the past is like trying to capture the wind in a bottle. Just when you think you’ve got it, you realize it is gone. And you never really had it to begin with.

To me, summer is the season when time passes more swiftly than in any other. The days, long and bright, begin to become shorter and shorter as summer slides down that slippery slope to the cold, dark, dead, dim days of winter.

We barely notice as the bright green trees grow gray-green with age and one day we wake up to the orange, red firey leaves of autumn. We barely take notice of our downhill slide as bright, blue skies of autumn, hide winter’s approach from us. We barely take notice until that first blast of winter’s cold slaps us unkindly in the face. By then it is too late – there’s no turning back. Winter has arrived and awakened our dread of the long, cold nights, and the living landscape now dead in the cold. By then, summer is long gone and time moves forward, callously taking everything we’ve ever known and everyone we’ve ever loved with it.

Summer is the time when most of us get caught up in lots of activities and add to the day-to-day “things” we all have to do, we seldom have to for reflection. There are too many things to do, not enough time to do them; but ironically the long hours of daylight in summer fool us into believing that we have all the time we need to get things done.

Before we know it, though, the bright summer green of trees begins to look lonesome, grayish-green, splotchy, worn, and dull. The balmy nights begin to have a slight chill about them. We hardly notice. The morning dew grows heavier and the sun greets the dawn later and sets sooner. We’re too caught up in “summer” to notice that time is passing us by and autumn is just a touch of frost away.

As I walked this morning, I watched as the veil of ephemeral mist vanished into the day, revealing another bright, summer morning, the summer sun shining in the clear, sapphire-blue sky.

It is summer and time is passing too swiftly. I think about my youth and the “springtime” of my life. It seems, looking back, it was a long stretch from kindergarten to college. Spring seems to have lasted a very long time.

Then came the summer of my life, and it seems like it lasted only a day or two and then as my hair went from dark to gray, autumn was upon me before I knew it. And I wonder whatever happened to summer?

It does no good to wonder. The summer of my life is gone. It came and went and I barely took notice of it. I was too “wrapped up” in things that mattered and seemed important at the time.

Now I wonder what they were. Again, I realize, too late, that I can never go back to that summer again. The summer of my life is gone.

This summer season seems more fleeting than any before it. Each day I promise myself that I will take more time to enjoy each day; take time to enjoy the sunshine; the eerie but beautiful morning mists; the soft, warm, gentle breezes, the balmy summer nights, and the shimmering summery night sky – when the moon, painted by a Devine hand, rests sp beautifully yet sp tenuously among the stars, clouds, and comets.

I wonder if I’m the only one who notices it. Surely not. But many times, I have not noticed it or many other things that have come and gone in my life. Now when I try to remember all I see are blurry watermarks; wispy, mist-veiled thoughts of experiences, days, and seasons that have come and gone.

Will I really take the time to enjoy summer this year? I promise myself I will. But, will I keep that promise or will I allow less important things to get in the way? John Lennon said that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. I promise myself that this summer I will not be too busy making other plans to enjoy summer. I promise myself.

Keeping that promise is another thing.

I will try hard to listen for the sound of soft gossamer wings that gently carry the fragile lessons and memories of summers past upon them. I will try to listen. I will try to hear.

So many summers in my life have passed and I don’t remember hearing them at all. I’m sure they were there, off in the distance, but I never had time to listen.

Sadly, it has taken me all these years to realize that I have broken too many promises. I have glanced where I should have looked. I have brushed off what I should have savored. I have made trivial things important and important things trivial.

Always too busy to appreciate those special moments I should have appreciated. I sadly realize now that they are now all gone. My summer memories now flying on pale gossamer wings – just vague shadows, unreadable shadows of the past.

I will try to hear them this summer. I promise myself I will.

The time has come for me to start keeping my promises. It is about time I learn from the many mistakes I’ve made. It is about time and it’s about seasons.

I will never have enough time.