Early evening squint as summer color is sucked from view.
Melissa Kirsch of The New York Times wrote today about summer ending.
It’s a topic most people mourn, and I understand. She talks about how evidence of fall sneaks in gradually—but it doesn’t sound very gradual when she points out September’s dramatic loss of daylight. By the end of the month, New York has lost 77 minutes and Seattle 98. At 6:30 in the morning the bedroom is still dark, and by 6:30 in the evening we’re turning on the lights.
DO YOU BELIEVE IT’S ALREADY…?
Jimmy Kimmel has had clips of TV personalities across the country greeting each other with:
“Do you believe it’s July already?”
And the next month:
“Do you believe it’s August?”
And again! Commentators asking their sidekicks:
“Do you believe it’s September?”
Not just a few clips, mind you. Over the months, too many to count.
Kimmel’s point was derogatory. Do these lazy people have nothing more important to report than the passage of time being a surprise? Right?
WRONG!
It’s not lame.
It’s not crazy.
It’s palpable.
People really are feeling robbed of time.
I definitely am.
Time has always clipped along for me because I’m, admittedly, warped regarding what I cram into my life. But this year I feel as though I’ve been thrown to the ground and mugged.
(Really inspiring introduction to today’s Between Brushstrokes and The Times, right?)
BUT, SERIOUSLY, WHY?
I think there is more to this feeling of fleeting than usual.
We seem to be living at breakneck speed, not from an inner sense of self, but in response to an endless stream of invitations to click, read, react, buy… and move on.
I was already on the path to becoming old before the computer generation kidnapped society, and I was never bored. I didn’t depend on something outside my wheelhouse to supply meaning. I lived most of my years thinking life was interesting.
Put it this way, I was never bored.
But lately I get caught in a trap where I feel I am performing life rather than experiencing it.
For example, I love reading, but I find I get lost reading online. It never ends. And I’ve become a slave to my laptop.
It’s not that I think I shouldn’t do what other people are doing. I’m realizing I don’t need to.
I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now – and there is a difference between stimulation and pleasure, and I am not short on stimulation.
Once I did things for the fun of it. Not necessarily with a goal in mind. Not because it would improve or inform, or make me healthier, more productive, better looking or better prepared.
I did them because I enjoyed them.
PLEASURE USED TO BE AN END IN ITSELF
Now I use AI to search for recipes I can’t access online, to correct grammar and to answer a medical question.
Useful? Absolutely!
But pleasure? Not really?
And it’s the feeling of pleasure that helps us judge what is worth pursuing.
Which brings me back to art.
Maybe art matters even more in an age of endless stimulation because a piece of art asks something quite different of us.
Not “Should I buy it?”
Not even “Is it good?”
But what is it to me? How does it make me feel?
The same question applies to a song. A book. A garden. A meal. A conversation.
So what are you curious about? What set you off as a kid? What interest could you pursue now?
And, most importantly, could you give yourself permission to do very little—and not call yourself lazy?
I admit I’m hardly the poster child for that last one. I used to keep a dust cloth by the front door so that if I was reading a book and the doorbell rang, I could drop the book, grab the dust cloth and answer the door looking as though I had been doing something productive.
That’s warped. I admit it!
But back on topic… no one argues that life is long.
And increasingly I find myself wondering: What am I actually going to remember? Because I’m not creating memories spending all day online.
AND SPEAKING OF MEMORIES
Recently I was talking with a friend about Jell-O.
Yes. Jell-O.
We both grew up in the Midwest, where there seemed to be two kinds: lime Jell-O with cottage cheese and lemon Jell-O with canned fruit cocktail.
We laughed.
And suddenly I could see it. I remembered liking the lime with cottage cheese. I remembered hating anything with canned fruit cocktail.
For a moment I was back there.
That is the peculiar power of memory. It isn’t simply something that happens to us. It is a place we can deliberately return to…almost like revisiting a room, a landscape, a piece of art or a favorite song.
And perhaps that’s part of why memories are so important. Looking back, there is somewhere to go.
As we age, the memories create a kind of timeline. And I believe it’s important to not merely revisit the old ones, but to keep making new ones. Because it will be the memories…not the hours online…that cause me to laugh or cry.
So perhaps what bothers me about September disappearing isn’t really the loss of summer. It is being reminded that time is going somewhere… whether I do or not.
Do I want this?
Do I want to spend a particular hour this way?
Is it creating a friendship, a painting, a meal, a memory? Or am I simply making another hour disappear?
IN CLOSING
I recently came across a few lines from the movie City Slickers.
Curly tells Mitch the secret of life:
“This one thing. Just this one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.”
“What’s the one thing?” Mitch asks.
Curly replies:
“That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
AI didn’t write this post