What I Learned | Summer 2022

The summer went by quickly, but I am so happy that autumn is (unofficially) here. It’s my favorite season. I love all the fall things like pumpkins and crunchy leaves and sweater weather. The only thing I’m not keen on is the PSL. Gag. However, that won’t keep me from fully celebrating the changing season. But now, it’s time to reflect on the previous one, where I did a little star-gazing, a lot of reading, and finally felt settled.

Here’s what I learned this summer:

I prefer reading shorter books, (also known as I have reading ADD.)

At the time I’m publishing this post, I have two books on deck: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the first installment of A Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin. Between the two of them, 1,442 pages, and they’re due to be returned to the library by next Saturday. I’ve been reading Wind-Up Bird for five days now and I’m still not halfway through it. I’m enjoying it, but why do books have to be so damn long? It came to my realization this season that I really don’t care for long books. I get bored and wish that the author would get to the point. I find myself constantly checking the progress bar on my kindle or flipping forward to see how many pages are left in the chapter that I’m reading. Somehow, deep inside, I must have known this about myself, because in this year’s reading challenge, I included five selections for the “Big Book” reading challenge. That is, books that are over 500 pages. Ugh.

Every day should start with a glass of lemon water.

During my last shopping trip to Sam’s Club (for those who aren’t in the States, it’s a membership-based warehouse store where you can get food in bulk) I picked up a big bag of lemons and have been tossing a few slices into my tumbler of water every day. I’ve read several articles about the benefits of starting your morning with lemon water and I’ve even seen some of my favorite yoga/healthy living gurus talk about it in their posts and videos, but wow, am I feeling a difference. One of the medications I take makes me retain water badly and since doing the lemon water, it’s helped prevent that, which has been nice. This is a habit I will continue in the future.

Being unsettled is not good for my mental health.

Earlier this summer, I finished moving all of my belongings into my partner’s house. I had been going back and forth between his place and my old house, and I was not doing well having to live out of a duffel bag for most of the week. I’m talking about panic attacks and major anxiety. Since making my decision to move, he has been encouraging me to call it “our home,” but that was difficult when I didn’t have all of my stuff around me. I’ve always been a minimalist at heart, but the things I do have, I cherish and use often. So, when I finally got everything together in one house and in its rightful place, I was able to call it our home.

It is not my (or anyone’s) job to be a crisis commentator.

There are some people I follow on Instagram or Twitter who share poignant and insightful posts after each catastrophe that is happening in the world. Each devastating hurricane, flood, wildfire. Each mass shooting, death of a public figure, every last senseless event. They have something to say about it all, and I often wonder if they are really saddened by the crisis or if, maybe, they are glad to have a new something-sad to speak on. It disheartens me because I’ve shared a lot of their posts in the past, and many others have as well. But I wish I could tell them something I read this summer: It is not your job to be a crisis commentator. It takes a lot of energy to grieve in public, and unless your words are doing something good, like sharing important resources, maybe we should conserve some of that energy and grieve in silence.

My inner handy(wo)man has missed the light of day.

I am a carpenter’s daughter. My father has been in the millwork industry for over 40 years and I grew up in a woodshop, inhaling the smell of lacquer thinner and paint, getting wood shavings stuck in my shoes and sawdust all over… everything. While I would never be able to do what my father does on a daily basis — he calculates measurements for kitchen cabinets in his head — I do think I’m pretty handy with tools. So, when I got to pull out the tools to do some handywoman stuff last month, I felt like I was right back in my dad’s shop.

I might have been a travel agent in a former life.

Frank and I have a couple of trips coming up this fall. We plan to go to the beach in October (my favorite time to visit the coast) and are going back to the Pacific Northwest in December for his yearly vacation. Once the plans were finalized, I immediately sat down and started researching things to do, places to visit, and restaurants to try. I have always been a planner because it keeps my anxiety at bay when I know what to expect. Also, it is my experience that if you wait till the last minute, you find out that a restaurant you’re dying to try requires reservations weeks in advance. So, I am that girl who is plotting every moment of our stay. Yes, I realize that plans can always fall through and we get off my itinerary, but at least I’ll have a list of backup options.

I will always be a space cadet.

A few weeks ago, a friend (who knows me well) sent me a message and asked if I had seen the moon that night. It was a rhetorical question. I mean, really, I have all meteor showers, major lunar changes, and other notable space events scheduled on my Google calendar. Of course, I had seen the moon. In fact, early the next morning, I woke Frank up and told him to bring his new telescope out to see if we could get a good look at it. That weekend, we made the drive down to the Shenandoah National Park, where, in the dark, tons of people gather to gaze up at the sky for the Perseids meteor shower. Some had cameras with large lenses. Others, just their naked eyes. But there was a camaraderie there of people who all felt alive when looking up at the twinkling stars that were billions of light years away.

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