There are obvious signs of the seasons: snow goes with winter, falling leaves with autumn, and sneezing with spring.##M:[more]## But more than the drenching humidity, more than the ice cream truck’s bell and the locust’s buzz, the sign that tells me that summer has truly arrived is the sight of my son and his friend patiently waiting to see which cricket will be the first to be devoured by their new buddy, Hops. A frog and bug version of “Survivor”, if you will.
Summer is replete with moments like this. Having to wait for something has its own beauty, its own rhythm. Of course it depends on what you’re waiting for. If it’s 5 o’clock and your doctor’s appointment was at 4:30 and you’re still not in, that’s annoying. Or if you’re in line at the bank and the line goes back to the door and there’s only one teller because everybody else is out to lunch, that’s maddening too. But that’s not the kind of waiting I’m talking about. I’m talking about the good kind, the slow, delicious kind Carly Simon describes in her song, “Anticipation:” “making me late, keeping me waiting.”
It’s the feeling right after you’ve ordered dinner and right before the food comes. It’s letting your popsicle melt and watching the juice dribble down your arm and wondering when it will finally drip off your elbow. It’s that moment between the time you climb up to the top of the waterslide and plunge into the pool at the bottom. In the hurry-scurry of September to June there are not enough moments like this. And you know it’s not only you when you feel like the days and months are zipping by too quickly because the kids are feeling it too.
A time management expert once told me that everybody is feeling the breathless passage of time these days because back in our youth, we had built-in periods of downtime, weekends with nothing to do, summers during which we could laze. For our children today, weekends can be just as busy or even busier than the weekdays with church, dance classes, family obligations, and participation in travel sports teams that take them all over the state. We don’t have enough time to catch our breath, much less lie back and watch the shapes in the clouds, wait for the fish to bite, and play kick the can out in the street. Our kids don’t even know what kick the can is.
And today the glorious and endless days of summer are also in danger of becoming overscheduled. Baseball segues right into All-Star season. There’s swim team practice at 7 a.m., and football starts August 1, cutting the summer in half. Kids who want to get caught up or get ahead in school can finish a year-long course in five weeks if they go from 8 to 2 every day. There’s pressure to be busy, to achieve, to strive and to grow, no matter what time of year. It’s almost as if we’re afraid that our kids will be bored and underachieving.
But we all need downtime to be creative. Some of the greatest minds in history support that idea. It was a warm summer night when Isaac Newton contentedly relaxed underneath an apple tree on his mother’s farm. He saw an apple falling from a tree and wondered why apples always tumbled down, while above, the pale August moon calmly sailed into the night. Imagine if he’d been running out to a swim meet, or taking a summer physics course at the local university. Humankind could have missed out on one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.
Look at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the age of 3 he started to play the keyboard. At 5 he started composing minuets. By his teenage years, he had mastered the piano, violin, and harpsichord. What if his father had been hustling him out to Kumon or allowed him to whirl away his leisure moments on GameBoy?
Take George Seurat, the French inventor of the technique known as pointillism, characterized by thousands and thousands of tiny dots, allowing the purity of the colors to come to life straight from the tube. I would guess that as a child he was allowed lots of periods of downtime. As an adult, that led him to create a painting style that would take a steady hand, patience, and yes, loads and loads of time.
One of my favorite anecdotes is about the poet William Butler Yeats, who would often go into a compositional trance while riding the bus. Apparently he would stare straight ahead, hum, and beat time with his hands, no doubt composing perfect iambic pentameter. I can relate. I get some of my best ideas when I’m driving or in the shower. I’m at the peak of my creativity when I’m given time to zone out.
So this summer I’m really going to do my best to let my kids spend lots of time doing nothing. They might groan at their corny mother, but I’m going to make them lie back in the grass with me and pick out dragons and unicorns in the sky. We’re going to watch the crickets hop past the frog and take bets on which will be the last one standing. I want them to know the joy of anticipation, to be able to imagine the sweet tang of the tomatoes ripening on the windowsill. Not literally of course, but figuratively, I want them to watch the grass grow.
In the words of Carly Simon, “these are the good old days.” I’m going to do my best to stretch them out and make them last.
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