Summer. What does summer mean? DOING NOTHING. Nothing.

Is there anything harder than working in a windowless office in the summer? All anyone wants is to feel the breeze, the heat on their skin, sear their eyes in the sunlight, have a big cool drink (because they’re hot), wear almost no clothing. No one wants to sit under the hum of an air conditioner, freezing cold indoors, needing fluorescent lighting to see what’s in front of them, wearing heels and suits and pantyhose and ugh, make-up!

When we’re grown up, when we work, when we don’t have a window in our office, we can only dream of those summer days when we were kids and ran around screaming, with ice cream drips leaving snail trails over our chins.

We hope and pray our own children get to experience what we so loved about summer…. many magical days of doing nothing. No camp, no summer projects, no appointments. Only TIME… time to discover how bored we are, how excruciatingly bored, and then time to go into the zone, to embrace the boredom, to realize that this boredom is the ultimate freedom and, boy, does it feel good.

So here’s a suggestion. Make it happen. Give yourself the gift of some boredom this summer. Take a day a week when you do NOTHING. No laundry, no paperwork, no phone calls, nothing. Let your children experience the exquisite pleasure of being so bored they willingly pick up a book, build a fairy house out of moss, or talk with their much-younger sibling about life or friends or why human’s palms have lines on them.

In the summer, we owe it to ourselves even more to make sure we’re not just stuck — physically and psychologically — in that windowless office, doing our duty, being good, oh-so-good, and missing the summer skies just outside.

Tags: BUddha

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 6:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.