Remember a childhood summer

In American popular culture, there’s a certain fantasy of the ideal childhood summer. It might happen at the beach, or in the mountains, but it’s definitely spent wild and outside, with friends, filled to the brim with happiness.

This is obviously not going to be true for every minute for anybody. It also presupposes a certain lifestyle where this freeform bliss can work.

That said, for many of us who grew up with long summer breaks from school, summer did feature at least a few more hours focused on things that were intrinsically interesting. If we went to summer camp, perhaps we could choose which themed week was of interest, or between different kinds of camp. Outside of the school schedule, there may have been a few more self-directed hours.

And so, these summers from the past offer clues to what might be of interest in adulthood too. Many grown-ups struggle to figure out what they might do for fun, or what might make work more enjoyable. What we chose when we could choose might be what we would choose now — if we put a little thought into it.

Buying the farm

Sometimes when people think of this question they make big life changes. I recently read Donald Hall’s memoir, String Too Short to be Saved, about his summers on his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm. He wrote the book as an elegy to a disappearing way of life. Then, as his grandmother was dying, he realized that he could in fact buy the farm from her children and adopt that way of life himself. He wound up doing just that.

Most of us are not going to buy the farm. But summers past might provide clues to interests, both professional and personal. So think back to a childhood summer. What did you look forward to? What did you do whenever you could? What made time seem to stand still and fly by?

Maybe it was a summer theater production you were part of each year. Maybe it was a wilderness camp where you got to sleep out under the stars. Maybe you have happy memories of spending all afternoon making crafts with your sister while your parents were at work.

Think about these memories. Spend some time really exploring them. Why do you think you felt so happy?

Often, it’s not the most obvious aspect. You enjoyed summer theater not because of the singing or dancing — fun as those are — but because you loved pulling a whole project together, start to finish, in three weeks. Maybe you went to an academic camp where the obvious pull was time away from home, but as you think about it, you recall that, for the first time, you felt like you could really talk with people about your ideas and they wouldn’t think you were weird for being into math. Maybe you had a job you really loved not because you loved selling hot dogs, but because you loved talking with different people all day long.

Lessons from a hot dog stand

Once you’ve got a grip on the “why” behind your happy summer memory, you can figure out how to add a little more of this into your current life.

Maybe you run a business where you are mostly in charge of strategy, but you might enjoy spending a day every week or two working directly with customers, just like you used to do at the hot dog stand. There are probably wise reasons to do this — and it would scratch that itch to talk with new people. If you loved summer theater, maybe you need to rethink your work flow to do more short and intense projects. I’ve long been fascinated by the teams that start new magazines, then hand them off to others to run, or even the teams that start new schools. Or maybe, if you loved that academic camp, you just need to join a more cerebral book club.

No, life probably won’t be like that magical summer you remember when you were 14 and figuring the world out. But on the other hand, there’s no reason to consign all summer happiness to the past. Because summers may have featured more discretionary time, or at least different time, they can give us clues to what might make life more interesting now — during the summer, and all year long.

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