The Permission to Be Seasonal

Nature doesn't apologize for its seasons. So why do we?

As adults, we're obsessed with optimization.

How can I be more productive? More efficient? More disciplined? We cram our days so full that "I never have time for anything" becomes both the complaint and the badge of honor. Somewhere along the way, we start believing that if we aren't operating at our best every single day of the year, we're somehow falling behind.

But summer challenges that.

It reminds us that life isn't supposed to look the same in January as it does in July.

Don't believe me? Go order a hot peppermint mocha and sip it in the July sun.

I dare you.

In the height of the summer, rules go out the window. Dinner becomes whatever is easiest to throw together between activities. Snack plates, watermelon, a quick lobster roll stop on the way home. Sometimes, on really lucky summer days, it's ice cream.

We stay up later because the sun does too. Laundry waits because sunsets won't. We eat outside, we leave the windows open, and we get a little dirty and sweaty and call that a good day.

No one spends an entire day sitting at the beach watching the ocean and calls that day wasted.

But, every year, like clockwork, come September we're expected to snap back into operating like robots. The beach towels are folded and put away. The sand is swept up. The same routines, the same pick ups and drop offs, and somehow the connection we had to nature and sunshine fades like the amount of daylight over time.

We accept that daylight gets shorter. We expect the trees to lose their leaves. We understand that gardens need time before they bloom again.

Yet somehow we've convinced ourselves that we should be immune to seasons.

(And don't even get me started on society's approach to winter... That's a post for a few months from now.)

Look.

Every tree outside your window knows when it's time to grow, when it's time to bloom, when it's time to rest, and when it's time to let go.

None of them apologize for it.

Maybe we weren't meant to be endlessly productive.

Maybe we were meant to be seasonal, too.