Summer is, traditionally, my least favorite season. It’s hot, it’s humid, and I’m bored out of my mind. As a kid, I didn’t know what to do with my time. The public library’s summer reading program wasn’t enough to tide me over. I could only ride my bike for so long. Most of my friends lived too far away for me to walk to visit them. I lived in boredom.
Now, as an adult, I’m experiencing similar problems.
Even though my time is much more limited due to a full-time internship, I still find myself searching for things to do to keep myself busy until I have the pleasure of returning to school.
I know, I know: I sound like a total nerd right now. But hear me out.
Summer should be a time of leisure, and it is. Almost too much so. Every year since kindergarten, I’ve put my life on pause for the hottest three months of the year. School is more than a time to learn about the causes of World War I or how to find the derivative of a parabola: it’s when we figure out who we are. We learn how we deal with stress, how we work with others, how to meet deadlines, what we like, what we dislike, our strengths, our weakness--we learn a lot more than the educational content. We network. We work. We live.
When we break for summer, it’s like none of that growth and development continues. Sure, it’s nice to have a break from the status quo. It’s really great to not have papers due every other week. But it’s not so great to realize that my life is on pause until I move back onto campus.
When I’m at school, I have many purposes. I’m a student. I’m a campus leader. I’m an employee. I’m a member of many organizations. I have responsibilities that I think about during all hours of the day. When I’m working in the summer, I worry about work for eight hours, then go home and think about everything I need to do before moving in.
It’s not that my summer work doesn’t matter. It’s important, too. But it does not consume me in the same way that my life at school does. And here’s the difference: my summer work is work. I work hard so that I can reap the benefits later (and because they deserve my all). But everything I do at school is my life. I work hard because I have no other choice--and I would not choose anything else.
During these summer breaks, I’m bored because I’m not living my life to the same extent that I live it during the other nine months. I can’t wait for the day that my summers are a continuation of everything that I do instead of a commercial break. That’s when life gets fun--when it stops feeling like a start-and-go and instead feels like I’m flying full speed ahead.
