I still love summer. As a child, summertime was by far my favorite time of year, mostly because it was the only season when you didn’t have to go to school, and you didn’t have to bundle up with five layers of clothing to fight against the bitter cold of winter. I loved baseball, and my birthday is in the summer. It was, and is, the best time of the year. However, as years have passed, I’ve come to appreciate every season of the year, as each season brings something different to look forward to.
As my children continue to grow up, I am reminded of the saying that the days are long but the years are short. Lately, I’ve been feeling like the years are short, and they keep getting shorter.
There is a rhythm to life, and to each season. The summer brings warm weather, fireworks on the 4th of July, campfires at night, and vacation time with the family. Autumn brings the start of school, football and soccer season, apple picking, and fires in the fireplace. Winter brings Christmas and snow, basketball and hot chocolate, and early darkness and time to rest. And spring brings warmth, new life and growth, and the realization that we indeed survived another winter! The rhythm of our lives is important. If we go too fast then we become stressed. If we go too slow we become complacent. If we find the right rhythm then we can feel both relaxed and satisfied - we can have a sense of purpose without being overwhelmed. Finding the right rhythm is healthy and good, and many times we are either going too fast, or too slow.
To find the right rhythm we need time for rest and reflection. We need to rest physically, mentally, and emotionally, in order to restore ourselves and “fill our buckets”. As I look forward to what will likely be a busy summer, I look forward to rest, to relaxation, and to finding a rhythm that will restore balance in an otherwise busy world. May we all find some time to rest, to be thoughtful, and to consider what it means to live in rhythm.
“Many scientists believe we are ‘hard-wired’ like this, to live in rhythmic awareness, to be in and then step out, to be engrossed and then detached, to work and then to rest. It follows then that the commandment to remember the Sabbath is not a burdensome requirement from some law-giving deity –‘You ought, you’d better, you must’—but rather a remembrance of a law that is firmly embedded in the fabric of nature. It is a reminder of how things really are, the rhythmic dance to which we unavoidably belong.”
Wayne Muller, “Sabbath”