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Independence Day defies definition
As a child, summer was easily defined. The word "summer" to me meant no school; spending long days outdoors, drenched in sunlight; finding mystery in undiscovered corners of the garage when it rained; running through every garden hose or sprinkler in the neighborhood�fully clothed; and nighttime coloring at the kitchen table with my sister during a thunderstorm.
This year, my mind has struggled to redefine "summer" in the context of my life and as I reflect on past summers I can't help but envy those children I spy in backyards or on playground swings, little legs kicking hard and higher toward the sky.
Suddenly time appears to me as an hourglass, and the older I get the more full the bottom half of the hourglass looks and in the deluge of coarse grains from above I can start to see my own limitations.
"Summer" no longer means what it used to. It certainly doesn't mean "the absence of school."
To my disdain I find myself thinking, sometimes quite hard actually, writing, reading, and surrounding myself in the delightful society of squares that dominate my life the other nine months of the year.
Square rooms, square desks, square chalkboards, square boxes that I pack my stuff into, square drawers in which to store my school supplies, and a square computer to type on.
"Summer" no longer means long days outdoors. Instead summer means, darting from one air conditioned building to the next, struggling to cast aside the curtain of humidity and heat that has been looming over the landscape for the past several weeks.
"Summer" no longer means incredible mystery. My daily routine extends itself into a rather inflexible status of predictability that can at times be eerily uncomfortable.
"Summer" it seemed, lost a lot of the elements that as a child left me dreamy eyed, just by hearing the word.
Then on the 4th of July, as I watched the fire works dress up the sky in spirals of color, and the Mississippi River mimicking their extravagance on the ripples of water below, for a moment, the hourglass disappeared.
The next time I was walking back from my summer class I realized why many children don't seem to mind the heat or humidity that I had been hiding from.
If you allow your self to first feel the heat, when you run through the sprinkler or the neighbor's garden hose, the water feels that much more refreshing.
It was becoming more clear to me that summer was not in need of redefining or defining at all.
But the blessing, and often the curse of higher education, is the need to define, and redefine.
The desire to be able to box up and package everything I learn into something that can be stored in a nice shelf then referred to at a later date is something often propagated by the higher learning experience, to a degree that is detrimental to students.
We become dependent on those boxes. Then when someone tips the box over and spills its contents all over the floor and we discover maybe that is not the way life is, we are surprised and vulnerable.
Summer is, and has always been, what I've made of it, just like every other experience. One is never better or worse than the other, just always different.
Sometimes in the heat and haze of college education it is hard to remember the simple solution: when you are hot, run through the sprinkler.
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