Why does mid-July always make it feel like summer is almost over? Can you feel the height-of-summer panic? People are starting to make summer bucket lists and count the days until August. There’s at least a good month or more of hot weather left, but everyone is starting to realize that summer won’t last forever and that fall, and school time, will be here sooner than we’d all like.
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last week mostly indoors with a nasty summer cold, but I’m feeling that panic a little right now. Even though I love autumn and winter, and the change of seasons is one of my favorite things about where I live, I still feel myself desperately clinging on to summer like it’s the cure-all for boredom, loneliness, sadness, etc. When the end of the season is in sight, I feel like I’ve missed something. Like I haven’t enjoyed summer enough or done enough fun and fulfilling things. Like I’m about to be carried past an opportunity for something great. Maybe it’s not so much panic as longing.
I hate endings. I would rather watch the beginning of a movie I like than the end. I prefer sunrises to sunsets. I leave books mostly read—but not finished—for an absurdly long time. I think I have built into me the idea that good things shouldn’t end and a desire and expectation of something extraordinary that’s never quite fulfilled. I think many people feel this, and I don’t think it’s an accident.
C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that if we have a desire, then something exists that will satisfy that desire. He says, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We aren’t meant to be fulfilled in this life, on this earth. We’re headed for another world that doesn’t end, where everything good and meaningful we long for exists in direct fellowship with God. Someday, we’ll never feel the end-of-summer emptiness again.
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