Measuring Summer

Have you ever reached August and realized the vast expanse of summer has melted away in the heat, leaving little more than a pool of dampness on the floor at your feet?

Have you ever pulled out that list you made at the beginning of May and wanted to cry? The glass of lemonade you set on it left a puckered ring in one corner. It’s smeared with barbecue sauce. There’s a mosquito squashed on the back, because the list is so long you rolled it up and used it to swat the whiny little blood-sucker.

And way too many things are still not crossed off.

Now, the lease is almost up on your summer, school is starting any minute, and you still have so much left to do that you make more lists, thinking that if you are more intentional about the way you spend every second of your day, you might actually be able to squeeze in that trip to the zoo. You pull out the graham crackers, Hershey bars, marshmallows and sleeping bags for a campout in the yard if nothing else.

You get up two hours earlier and try combining your yoga workout with your shower—isn’t that why we have walk-in showers, after all? —hoping you might have more minutes to cram full of the things you wanted to have done by the end of summer so you could be the one at Back-to-School Night with a smug grin on your face telling everyone how great your summer was.

Does anyone else feel this way? I swear, it happens to me every summer.

I start measuring the success of my summer by the number of items crossed off my list.

Does anyone else do this? Perhaps it’s only a habit I gained by scheduling my life around the school calendar for so many years, trying to pack a year’s worth of projects and adventures into the scant weeks of summer break.

And no matter how I try stretching it, summer is only so long.

When I start measuring my summer line by line, the assessment of my summer is soon skewed, and I’ve lost the big picture.

Have you ever looked at a blueprint—those diagrams that direct the construction of a building? If so, perhaps you’ve noticed that on a blueprint, the length of the entire exterior wall is given. This is so the builder doesn’t measure out the length of the first interior room, and then the second, and then the third. They have to start from the original point for each measurement, and all have to fit within the total length. Because if the first measurement is off just a tiny bit, and the second one is off just a little bit, too, by the time you hit the end of the wall, all the little bits add up to a problem, and the whole wall ends up wrong. And then the inside dimensions don’t fit together like they’re meant to.

All those items on a list don’t quantify the depth of a summer’s beauty. There’s a dimension missing if we measure life that way. So many things happen between the lines. The things that add quality instead of quantity.

There’s the love you feel visiting with your sister on the patio, the happiness of fishing with the grandkids at the lake, the laughter during the picnic by the creek, the connection at the campout with friends. Gratitude for the flowers, the sunsets, the morning walks, a cool breeze coming through the window at night.

The truth is that the number of chores and projects accomplished during a summer is not an accurate measurement. Not even the number of words on the page. It’s all about the depth of what happens in between.       

Dare I say…

The whole is greater than the summer’s parts.

Ready to throw that list away now? How are you going to spend those precious remaining moments of summer? In the comments box below, tell me one thing that adds more to your summer experience than anything else .