Remember the song “Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer; those days of soda and pretzels and beer”?
If you do, it ages you. And it obviously ages me.
But it expresses well how I feel when the beautiful summer stretch of sunshine comes along. It’s tough to be in work mode.
Yesterday, I took my aging mother for a daytrip to Vancouver Island. (Hey, the ferry’s free for seniors Monday through Thursday—”I’m a senior,” I said to the ticket people, “and this is my mother.” Still, she had to show ID. Go figure!)
Being a workday, I took along my lap-top to stay on top of things. Hey, a 90-minute ferry ride each way yields three hours of potential work time.
I never opened the laptop.
I’m not surprised. That’s how it always is with me when I’m out of work primary mode, or out of office, especially when the outdoors beckons! And, especially during those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.
Not so for everyone, apparently. My son, a university prof, like everyone in that profession, needs to spend a good chunk of his summers researching and writing. Does he do it in his office? Not on your life.
He chooses a beautiful or exotic setting somewhere in the world, plunks himself down in a hostel or an AirBnB for a few weeks, and works like crazy. This year, he chose Budapest (Hungary).
One year it was five or six different European cities, each in a different country, for 3 or 4 days each. In the covid year, he did it in his vehicle while travelling across the landscapes of the western U.S.
Put me into such a script and I wouldn’t get much done.
Shows how different we all are as humans.
Thank goodness, we are so diverse! Life would be way more boring if we were all the same. And progress would grind to a halt. (To be truthful, we’d probably still be living in caves.)
My summer reading is the book, Sapiens; a brief history of humankind, in which the author, Harari, tries to draw a straight line through all of history, of which homo sapiens (one of at least four species of humans—we apparently wiped the other three out), have occupied but a very brief period.
Diversity is a big theme of the book, but one element of that diversity always seemed to prevail over all others, leading us to where we are today—and where we are headed. But in that path, new diversities emerge, again to become dominated by one element of that melange, forcing convergence.
So, whether in the big picture, or the individual one, we are always living with expansion and contraction of diversity. We see the tension between diversity and convergence all over the world right now, whether in political upheavals (Ukraine, Afghanistan, the U.S., the Conservative party, the Surrey mayoral race), microorganisms (like the emergence of viruses, and their treatments), racial tensions (Myanmar, China, U.S., Richmond, BC), socio-economic tensions (the downtown East side, and almost every other city), care for the planet, and many more.
It’s my opinion that, the more we can live with, and appreciate, diversity, the more we can live in harmony with nature and with one another.
So, if I’m a day late with this post because I couldn’t bring myself to open my laptop on one of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, I’ll appreciate the understanding you’ll grant me.
My son would have had it out on time, I’m sure.
In the vernacular: Let’s just chill, and not judge one another!
