Summer's end

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Yesterday was Labor Day, and tomorrow Seattle kids begin wending their way back to the classroom.  Every kid who has ever lived, I suspect, has exclaimed -- "Summer's over?  Already?  We hardly did anything!  Why did we waste so much time doing nothing?"

Of course, all that "doing nothing," from an adult's perspective, is what makes a child's summer seem so wondrous, so magical.  But that's not the point of today's lecture.

Analogizing life to a season, or to a year of seasons, is a cliché.  But it's become a cliché because it's an analogy that comes to mind so spontaneously, and because it expresses our emotions so perfectly. 

We begin every summer full of plans and hope.  We accomplish, perhaps, a few of those plans, perhaps traveling for a couple of weeks.  But we spend most of the summer shopping, mowing the lawn, driving the kids to camp, fixing meals, and -- of course -- going to work.  And suddenly the nights are chillier, the leaves are turning, summer is over and -- looking back -- we can hardly recall how our days were passed.

A week ago, Tim Kreider wrote a piece for the New York Times which expressed and expanded upon this commonly-felt frustration.   He had planned to spend the summer in Iceland, a visit he'd been hoping to make and repeatedly putting off for years.  "The summer looked as wide open and shimmering with possibility as the summers of childhood."  He didn't, of course.  One obstacle after another seemed to spring up in his path.  And now, the summer was over and he looked back with -- as he put it -- a sense of "desolation."

It wasn't just that he had delayed Iceland for another year.  Iceland was -- again, as he puts it -- but one exterior sign of an inward "existential panic."

... [I]f you're a procrastinator and a ditherer like me you can manage to sustain until well into midlife the delusion that you might yet get around to doing all the things you meant to do ....  But at some point you start to suspect that you might not end up doing that stuff after all, and have to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might pretty much be it.

And we aren't just talking about last summer, he reminds us.  As he feels at summer's end, he no doubt will also someday feel lying in a hospital bed, sensing the life drain from his body.  Nothing will change.

I'll probably still be evading the same truth I'm evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose.  And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.

Mr. Krieder speaks for all of us -- at least for most of us -- doesn't he?  In June, I was excited as we approached the solstice, the days increasingly long and warm and sunny.  Summer seemed to stretch ahead far into the horizon of time, so much time to do so many things. 

I did have a couple of wonderful hiking trips, and during those trips time slowed down dramatically; so much occurred each day that a day on trek was felt as a week or more of normal, daily life.  But most of the summer, I was not trekking.  I was sitting around the house -- reading, playing with the computer, walking well-worn walks around my neighborhood.  Time passed.

And now, it's the day after Labor Day.  And as summer passed, so, metaphorically, we all draw ever closer to the Labor Day of our entire lives.

We envy a child's ability to do nothing all summer, and enjoy it.  Analogously, I suppose we should value our own lives not just for life's great events -- the travel, the marriages, the births, the job promotions -- but also for the quiet nothingness of our daily lives.  "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans," wrote a guy named Allen Saunders in -- where else? -- Reader's Digest (later absorbed into lyrics by John Lennon).  We see the truth in that, but something tells us, and has told centuries of poets before us, that a life filled with forgettable days has been a life wasted.

As Lucy told Charlie Brown, "I don't want any Downs! I just want Ups and Ups and Ups and Ups."

Macbeth, himself no ditherer or procrastinator, became King of Scotland.  But even he, his life seemingly filled with sound and fury, fully understood that sound and fury weren't enough;  life still crept by, day by day, and ended in a tomb.

"Life sucks, and then you die."  Shakespeare just expanded on the thought, and expressed it more eloquently.