Quick Thoughts on this Summer

Hmmm... it’s been a long while. I didn’t meet my goal of averaging a book a week for the summer, but it was a pretty good total: Catch 22, Closing Time, Steppenwolfe, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Metamorphosis, Running With the Buffaloes, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, Slaughterhouse 5, and Flowers for Algernon; nine actual books. nine out of... 14 weeks. Okay, I only partway met my goal. But I learned several things through trying this: 1) If you don’t set out to do anything, you won’t accomplish anything. Or, it’s better to have tried and failed rather than to have never tried at all. 2) If and when you do set out to do something, it is probably a good idea to pace yourself and ease into it rather than diving headfirst. This way, you are less likely to burn out and more likely to stay consistent. 3) You need to set aside time to do what you want/need to do. If you just go through the day without a specific plan of when or where you are going to do something, it won’t get done. Time will slip away and you will never get that time back.

That last realization was perhaps the most poignant towards the end of this summer. I finished my first year of college in the beginning of May- I had May, June, July, and half of August before I had to go back for XC camp week. 14 weeks. An eternity. Yet, it flew by faster than I could have ever imagined. Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the faster you go, the slower time goes. Right? I actually don’t know, but this summer I was moving pretty quickly the whole time, and time went by faster than I could have ever imagined. I’m writing this at the beginning of my third week of classes for fall semester, and I feel like my summer was the blink of an eye. And really, it was. Between working construction full-time, training for triathlon/cross-country, and my ambitious book reading project, there was not much room for summer to exist. 

And this leads me to part three: What is the point of all this? What was I trying to accomplish this summer? When I ask myself what my purpose was this summer, I come up empty-handed and speechless. I cannot really think of this summer as anything other than an extended, wasted waiting period. All I was doing was passing time from spring to fall; I looked and grasped for a higher purpose, such as my reading project or working or training; each of these things provided a temporary purpose, but none of them really satisfied me. I kept filling up on these and coming away emptier than I was before. Looking back, I see the summer as the Lost Possibility. I could have done so much, but instead I just tried to get through as fast as I possibly could. I don’t want to live that way. I want to embrace every moment of my life as the precious gift that it is.