It is the dead of summer, that moment in our lives and in the life of the summer when there is as much summer in front of us as behind us.
For those of us who love the heat, who love the summer, who wait for it all winter and who yearn for it coming back when the fall puts its grip on us, it is a moment to fully enjoy and to observe, as so many of us do.
It is a moment when we face everything we have wanted for about six more weeks after having experienced warmth for about six weeks that are already behind us.
This week we are in the thick of it, in a perfect storm of beach, heat, humidity, thunderstorms, et cetera.
There is heat here. There is heat everywhere.
Air conditioning only goes so far. Stepping from a cool automobile onto a sizzling sidewalk under a burning sun during the heat of the day makes life miserable.
There are many people who refuse to use air conditioning for just that reason – and they too are miserable after their own fashion.
There is no escape form the dead of summer.
We all go to work but work doesn’t have the flavor or the zest of the beach at the dead of summer. Most of us would rather be doing nothing than putting on shirts and ties, dresses and work clothes and making the march into the T and a few minutes later into a downtown skyscraper.
The dead of summer is a great time to live and forgive us, a great time to go the other way. Dead of winter funerals, after all, are so hard to endure.
Above all, the dead of summer is a time to enjoy our lives, to live for the moment as if suspended in animation.
It is a time to step back and to enjoy the moment – for as we know – the summer passes quickly.
The dead of summer moment we are enjoying right now will pass like the snap of a finger, just like that.
It was written quite some time ago by one of the world’s great German philosophers that everything about our lives is fleeting, that our entire life is fleeting, in fact.
When we are young, we take no notice of the time passing by. When we are old, we look back and wonder where all the time went.
What we should be concentrating on is the moment, the right now, because that’s all we own when you come right down to it.
Happy dead of summer.
