The first day of summer vacation

Monday morning, I woke up and thought, “Today is the first day of my summer vacation.” I don’t work in a school, but because I help a niece who does, my schedule revolves around the school calendar, and Monday was my first free day.

I thought back to summers when I was a child and recalled that feeling of freedom brought on by the first day of summer vacation. Freedom from schedules, classes and routines. Summer meant freedom to go to the library on a weekday or play all day or stare up at the sky and watch the clouds shape-shift into different kinds of animals and objects.

(Photo by Kranich17 from Pixabay.com)

“What do you want to do?” I remember friends would ask. We could go to the park or the public swimming pool or ride our bikes or play kickball in the street. So many options.

If Buzz Lightyear had been around when I was a child, I would have echoed his enthusiasm, to infinity and beyond. The start of summer vacation held that feeling that there was nothing to hold us back, nothing to limit our freedom.

That same morning, I read the “Be Glad,” chapter in Just One Thing by Rick Hanson, and I pondered ways to increase my awareness of good things happening in my life.

Hanson’s first suggestion in “Look for things to be glad about” is to consider “bad things that never happened or were not as bad as you feared.”

I am familiar with this practice from a clinical research program I participated in almost forty years ago, applying the methods used for military veterans who had PTSD to rape survivors. It was only a few years after I had been raped, and I was struggling with fears and anxieties that resulted from having been raped.

In the program, I learned to pause when fears and anxiety threatened to overwhelm me and ask myself, “What is the worst that can happen in this situation?” That practice helped me to see that my fears were usually out of proportion to the situation, and the increased awareness lowered my stress level.

Hanson talks about the negativity bias our ancestors developed to keep them safe (or even alive) and he says we can compensate for this negativity bias “by actively looking for good news” (page 69).

Even with forty years of practice, I can still forget to keep the good things front and center, to give more weight to the positive so that the scales tip toward positivity.

This summer, I want to return to that feeling of freedom I had as a kid, to throw schedules out the window and live more spontaneously. I want to pay more attention to what makes me happy—and do more of that. I want to be glad, to feel joy.

I began by baking on Monday morning, and then again on Tuesday. I played in my garden (mulching) and sat on the patio reading every evening. Today, the park is calling me.