Sitting with Summer: When Seasons and Life Don’t Play Well

Sometimes everything just goes right.

The sun shines on a clear-blue-sky kind of day, and you happen to have that day off.

You’ve got money in your pocket just for spending, and friends are waiting on you to meet up.

Sometimes everything goes right… until it doesn’t.

Until you get a phone call that you never could have predicted.

Or your best friend gets a diagnosis that shatters your heart too.

And even your dog seems to go distant.

What’s going on?

We can easily look at social media photos, less-than-100-word posts and book covers to see that the world around us places a high value on the best of life’s seasons. In summer, we want images of sunglasses, beachfront villas, cerulean oceans and not a care in the world. In winter, we want cozy chalets, a ski-up bar, and a driveway that doesn’t have to be shoveled to get to work.

But what if life doesn’t look like that?

What if that phone call came on a breezy June Tuesday afternoon? And suddenly, that breezy blue sky feels like the dead of winter where you can’t see past your hand for all the fog and wind and rain.

In a 2019 opinion piece for The Washington Post, Arthur C. Brooks asserts that our lives on social media should not equate to our living. One study he references found, “Heavy users . . . of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely [than light users] to be unhappy, to be in low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts.”

So what does it say for us, no matter what our age, when we are in a season of life that doesn’t “go” with the season around us? If we didn’t see Facebook posts of families on the beach or at Disney World, would our season of life seem as bleak?

If Instagram and TikTok didn’t reverberate with summer music and dance beats while everyone in the video is smiling and laughing, would we still feel down?

I think it’s time we tell ourselves, and our kids or students, to get off the device and go outside. Or at least open a window. If your summer feels more like someone else’s winter, it’s time to let the light in. It’s time to remind yourself that it is okay to live through a season of life that doesn’t match up to the season outside.

And it is okay to feel as though life is passing you by (even when it isn’t) because you or someone you know is in a season of ache, disappointment, or tragedy. What you’re allowing yourself to experience is real life.

Real life doesn’t just fit a 1,080-pixel screen on your phone.

It fits under covers and behind corners and in the kitchen and over a cup of coffee. Real life takes days off from the “high life” and sets down the text thread to be in the moment.

So, take heart.

When you look at your friend’s vacay photos and find that you can’t relate, just know that you are both living real life — just in different seasons. And that’s where we get to intersect: by cheering each other on in the seasons that are easier and helping each other out of the pit when they’re less-than-desired snowdrifts.

Sit in your summer or your winter, wherever you are, confident that seasons will change, that you don’t need to rush, and that someone else’s real life isn’t better than yours. Your real life is now and it is okay right where you are.

Photos courtesy of Courtney Cook, Ari Apple and Derick McKinney on Unsplash.