Love live the Summer. From the moment you leave behind the warm seat of your last class and dive into the whirlwind of outdoor activities, late-night fun, or just-plain-relaxin’, Summer is an experience that lets you grow, experience the world, and find freedom and creativity. For eight months out of the good year, we are cramped up in our university lecture halls. We eat stale packed lunches and only breathe the outside air when we run to the nearest McDonalds in between intensive study sessions at the library. I’m not knocking school – we love school – it keeps us busy, nourishes our minds, and prepares us for ultimately when we have to leave our parents’ houses and checkbooks.
But we need Summer as much as we need the air or water. Summer is the time to recharge our bodies and minds. Sleeping in late and not having to worry about the long list of things you must accomplish by the end of the day is a sacred privilege that kids cherish in the summertime. There is time for being languid, for sitting and thinking, for loosening up all of the nuts and bolts in your body that were secretly applied during those marathon midterms and finals.
So for all you parents out there who don’t think we need all of that four months for ourselves, think again. Do you want us to be zombies? I often find myself forgetting who I am and what my purpose is during the hectic school year, an unfortunate side-effect of ushering myself from class to class, quickly cramming in the information and then spewing it out like some kind of mindless machine gun when the time calls for it. Should we forgo the experiences of Summer for another nosedive into another textbook? Sure, there’s a lot of meaningful information that we can read off the pages. But Summer only comes around once a year, and we grow up pretty fast if you hadn’t noticed already.
Give us the time to develop our own perceptions of the world. Though Summer may only seem like an excuse to have a lot of frivolous and unnecessary fun, we find philosophy in midst of the road trips, the late nights, the beach days and the lazy pajama days spent at home. They are precious memories, character-builders, and lessons learned about life. And we will thank-you for them one day.