There is no moral imperative to enjoy every summer day
Every year when the summer starts it brings with it guilt. I finish work, come back home from the office, stand in our balcony looking onto the building's little internal patio and wonder: should I be outside, enjoying the summer?
Getting your feet wet in the ocean feels like a proper summer activity and, as I lived most of my life not more than 500 meters from the shore, I got to do that very often. Whenever I wanted, actually. It took no more than half an hour to get there, wet the feet, satisfy the urge and come back home. One feels entitled to mark the summer day as properly enjoyed, when one has wet their feet in the ocean. But now I live in Berlin, no ocean to be seen, and the ethereal "enjoying the summer" precept gets a bit harder to define and enforce. What is it exactly that I feel I should be doing? Sitting in the park in the 35 degree weather, uncomfortably reading a book for twenty minutes? Spending money on coffees I don't really want, to read a book in the café for a little while? Going for a kind of derivative walk, same walk I go on most days, only hotter and with more expectations attached?
I don't want to do things every day. In any other season that is no big deal, I stay home and feel fine about it. In the summer, however, I feel guilt. I'm not enjoying the summer. I'm not making the most of it. I'm not making the most of my youth, why not, while I'm at it; am I actually just kind of wasting my life?
No, man. No, no. Calm the fuck down. It's nice to enjoy the summer when the conditions for proper summer enjoyment are all met. These are not just it being summer, although that is for sure one of them. Another condition I can think of rather quickly is not being at work. When I am on vacation in the summer, I can confidently say, I properly enjoy every day. Summer and summer vacation are different things, I remind myself as I type this, and 30 degrees alone do not summer vacation make. It's also possibly worth remembering that even as a child I spent some summer (vacation!) days rotting inside the house bored to hell and back, so no need to be romanticizing all that, either.
I do hope we get to go on a little vacation this summer, though, but things are looking a bit complicated, schedule-wise. We'll see. I am a profoundly coastal person and the lack of clear orientation a shore brings to a city is the single one thing I cannot get used to here. What's Berlin looking at? No one knows. We have the river, I guess, which is rather un-pretty in most places but is home to some guys like this one.
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