Oh Sh*t, i forgot to summer!

This one is a quicky, partly because I’m just dipping in to point people to Erin Furtak’s excellent post on an adjacent topic. In it, she talks about radically shifting her summer’s focus to family, fun, and rest, and then fitting work time into what is left.

She also mentions that some summers this can be challenging for either work or money reasons. Frankly and in transparency, I’m still in this zone, funneling all my dollars into daycare for my younger daughter and trying to finish a major book revision.

There may be other life and career stage reasons that Furtak’s admirable reorganization doesn’t feel quite within reach (though I think we should all take her post seriously): for example, summer may be the time social scientists can travel to conduct fieldwork, or the time grad students, precarious, and junior faculty need to teach to make ends meet.

 Nonetheless, the question that title’s Furtak’s post, “What Makes it Feel Like Summer?” Is a good prompt to us all.

 Often, when I get to the end of a summer and feel as though it has flown by or because I’ve wasted it in work, this is because when I look back on those precious months, I can’t find markers of summer time activities. Sifting through the days in my memory, the markers of a July day or the hallmarks of late-June are sadly inconspicuous.

A compromise practice, then, for those of us doing a bit more work this summer than we might prefer (or, heck, even if we do prefer it) might be to create a list of activities that are special, summer-time specific events and experiences.

To help you brainstorm, here are some of my own:

·      Go to my city’s food truck Wednesdays

·      Eat happy hour oysters with my husband on a two-week beach vacation

·      Read a new (to me, obvi) Edith Wharton novel. I’ve been doing this as a tradition the last several summers

·      Read in the hammock

·      Take my girls to a matinee

·      Paddleboard at the lake at least once

·      Eat dinner outside as much as possible

·      Go with parents, sister, and kids to waterpark

·      Show my girls fireflies (we don’t have them where we live, but will be traveling to my hometown, which does)

Some of these are bigger, and involve travel, but others can be applied any time: by carrying dinner outside, opening my summer Wharton, or taking my reading to the backyard hammock. I note that there’s an emphasis on family connection here, especially doing stuff with the girls, and on the sensory in my list as well: warm air, cold, salty oysters and wine, fireflies in the dusk. 

My plan is to distribute these markers of summer like jewels across these precious weeks so that when mid-August rolls around, I’ll know that the days were well spent.

If you’d like help thinking about your own days, work-life balance, etc., consider coaching with me. In June, I’m running a sale on coaching packages. 3 sessions for $300. You can either use the sessions this summer, as you plan your own adventures, or save them for the fall. Book an exploratory session here: https://katherinefusco.com/work-with-me