And Summer Ends....

Hal Borland wrote:  “Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life.”

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of Summer for many of us.  I remember Nat King Cole singing a silly song:

“Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer.  Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer. Those days of soda and pretzels and beer. Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer.  Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.”  

And the song ended with the words, “You’ll wish that Summer could always be here.”

But Summer doesn’t stay with us—like all the other seasons of life it too, must fade away in order to let the Autumns come.  Would you have it otherwise?

If you “wish that Summer could always be here,” you will live eternally in a boring world of good times, “those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer” consisting of “soda and pretzels and beer,” along with vacations and beach excursions and picnics, or as Borland put it, with “high tide always and a full moon every night.”  

An eternal Summer would have us miss and never know “the rhythms that are at the heart of life.”  For life consists of seasons (infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and maturity)—seasons of all kinds—and to be alive means to live through all the seasons that come to us. 

Borland writes:  “Essentially, Autumn is the quiet completion of spring and summer.  Spring was all eagerness and beginnings, summer was growth and flowering.  Autumn is the achievement summarized, the harvested grain, the ripened apple, the grape in the wine press.  Autumn is the bright leaf in the woodland, the opened husk on the bittersweet berry…”

Life has many seasons and if we try to avoid them or ignore them we will “never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life.”