Take a break

This is a time to relax, a time to give your mind and your body, and your emotions too, a bit of a break. Let others do the hard stuff today and for the rest of the week, while you sit back and contemplate the meaning of your life. Despite what some might say it does have a meaning, and a purpose, and an ultimate goal.

I do love living in a place that has defined seasons. Sheer heat and humidity underscore the languor of the Deep South, but it is also the relative sameness of the weather that allows many activities to continue year round without the seasonal sharp breaks we live with here in Vermont.

The seasons affect us differently. The contractors and the farmers are in peak execution mode—working the full long span of the lengthened summer day to store up resources. In my professional world, this is a period of planning and scheduling, wrapping up work plans for the fiscal year just started and thinking ahead to the burst of energy that hits with cool fall weather. When school start again, even those of us with no children in our lives feel the call back to action. We feel it in our friends and colleagues, the distant memory of how it felt to launch all new projects for the year calling us too back into action. But that is not today’s outlook.

Today and tomorrow and next week, we are clearing out files and getting estimates and putting together packages for visiting companies and towns. We are making detailed calendars to show how many visits need to occur in July, how many in August, and most critically, how many must be completed by mid-November when holidays change the rhythm of the year again. Once January rolls around, it is the legislative season, and those of us in any psychic proximity to Montpelier must roll with the punches. In a very real sense, it is only from now to mid-November—four short months interrupted by the sensual blast of foliage season—that we have to break the back of our annual work plans.

It’s enough to make a person want to sit down.

I must remember, too, the more insidious effects of season. Like many other people, I suffer from seasonal affective depression with its annoyingly appropriate acronym (SAD) and from the less well known variant that hits in July and August. And so the above horoscope from my favorite kick-butt New York Post is an apt reminder that for me taking time to restore my inner resources is not self-indulgence but simple good sense.

Take a break. Give your spirit some room. Relax. It’s summer, you know. Live in this season and in this day. Leave the worries of tomorrow for tomorrow. Breathe in so that you can breathe out. Respect the rhythms of the world. Breathe.