The slow summer and what unstructured time produces.
What a week with nothing in it teaches
My son asked me this July what I actually wanted to do this summer. Not what we had planned — what I wanted. He was nine. I said I wanted to walk somewhere without a route. He said: okay. We walked for two hours in the hills behind the apartment without knowing where we were going and it was the best morning of July.
The summer question — what do you want to do? — is different from the summer plan. The plan comes from obligation and habit: the camps, the bookings, the things that fill the calendar so you can answer 'what are your plans this summer?' with something that sounds adequate. The want comes from somewhere less social.
My son's question surprised me because I hadn't been asked it recently by an adult. Adults plan summers around what is available and what is affordable and what they've committed to. The wanting gets folded into the logistics and sometimes you reach September without having done the specific thing you actually wanted.
The slow summer — the summer with space in it — is hard to choose. It requires saying no to things that have the appearance of good ideas. It requires tolerating the guilt of unoccupied days. It requires trusting that boredom, in large enough doses, produces something. It almost always does.
The walk we took was nothing. It was also the thing I'll remember most from that July. The wanting gets folded into logistics and sometimes you reach September without having done the specific thing you actually wanted. The slow summer is hard to choose deliberately. But it's worth it.
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