At Life's Summer Solstice

At Life’s Summer Solstice

(Warning:  Temporary ranting ahead.  Hopefully the last time for a long time …)

I have a problem with the solstices. Both summer and winter.  For the last God-knows-how-many years, I fall into a funk a few weeks before the longest and shortest day of the year.  In early-mid June and December, like clockwork, something shifts, and the world starts looking bleak and sad, hopeless and unpromising. A bi-annual, mini existential crisis smack in the middle of what should be the happiest times of the year. Of course, the December solstice takes place during the Christmas/Chanukah/Kwaanza/New Year holiday season, time of celebration and festivity, magic and wonder, giving and receiving, honoring the past while welcoming new beginnings, possibility and change. The June solstice brings graduations and weddings, school break and vacations, beaches and barbeque, fun in the sun, summertime and the living is easy.  Oh, joy.

So why do I start the seasons feeling despondent and dejected?

“Well, that’s no biggie,” I hear you saying; “plenty of people experience sadness and SADD around the winter holidays.”  Yes, that’s true:  many suffer from isolation, disappointment, depression, too much or not enough family/social contact.  “So you’re not special.”  Okay, fine.  But what’s this about the summer solstice?  Why should summertime inspire such strong, icky feelings of woe?  I mean, who doesn’t love summer?  The shedding of clunky outerwear, the no-socks/open-toe shoes, the long days and sultry nights?  You may have already heard me rant against much of the summer-in-the-city life: how I abhor the inescapable heat (anything over 85 degrees qualifies); sweating through my clothes, even the “naked dresses”; the overheated, crankier-than-usual New Yorkers; the foul and fetid stench of the sidewalks; the hordes of clueless tourists mucking up pedestrian traffic; the rats and roaches frolicking on the pavement.  Yuck.  But there are far deeper explantions for my bi-annual anguish.

Oh yes, did I mention my birthday falls at the end of June, soon after the summer solstice?

Which, it would seem, be even more reason to embrace the solstice and the arrival of summer.  To celebrate one’s own personal holiday, to welcome the arrival of one’s own personal “new year” and the possibilities it might bring …

But, alas, both winter and summer, my initial tendency is not to say “thank you!  thank you! thank you!” for the gifts of the past 12 months, to appreciate the fullness and beauty of the present, to look forward to another shiny new year and the infinite potential of the future. Rather, I tend to look back in disappointment at the year gone by, take stock of all that I failed to accomplish, all that I didn’t do, see, change, all that my life seems to lack, and lament the inexorable passage of time.  Another year on this spinning, tilting planet gone, gone, gone.  Another year down, one less to go …

It’s an unhealthy habit, hard to break.  One that, for many of us, becomes engrained at some point during childhood or young adulthood.  Dwelling in the past, living in scarcity rather than appreciating abundance, focusing on the negative rather than recognizing the positive.   Fretting over an uncertain future.  Focusing on what’s missing.  Who got away.  What’s been lost.  What needs fixing. What didn’t work out.  What was tried, what had failed.  Alas, this has been my experience for quite a few of the past years, coming on most virulently, distressingly around the commencement of my twice-annual “new years” in June and December ….

Now I’m no physicist, but like everyone I learned in grade school that the earth tilts to and fro on its axis as it makes its yearly revolution around the sun.  The northern and southern hemispheres’ proximity to or distance from the sun affects the light and temperature it receives, creating the seasons and their wondrous changes.  On the March and September equinoxes, the earth stands upright in its axis in relation to the sun.  The sun crosses the equator, the length of the day equals the length of the night, and you can balance eggs even on the pointy end.   (Really. You can.  Try it next equinox.)  Immediately thereafter, the earth begins to tilt again towards the sun –  if it’s September, the southern hemisphere shifts sunward; in March, it’s the northern hemisphere receiving the sun’s love and attention.  For some three months, the earth in its axis keeps tilting more and more towards the sun as it revolves around it, until it reaches the solstice, the longest (or shortest, depending upon where in the world you may be) day of the year.  And at that moment, it reverses its shift, which begins to shorten (or lengthen, depending upon where in the world you may be) the days again. Until, some three months later when, for an instant, the earth stands fully upright, in perfect equilibrium, as the sun aligns with the Equator, before it crosses and the opposite hemisphere can begin to receive its favors again …

And so on, and so on, all the years of our life.

Which brings me back to the summer solstice. 

I live in the northern hemisphere, where the days get longer and longer in June, until, on the solstice, they suddenly, silently, unperceptively, start getting shorter.

The days get longer and longer - until they don’t.  Until now.

Like 2014, my summer solstice has arrived.

My earthly experience has tilted:  Actuarially speaking, the number of my days here have begun to shorten. Best-case scenario, I’ve passed the mid-point of my life; the second half has unofficially begun.  Which means that if all goes well and I don’t get hit by a bus or felled by some nasty malady, it is most probable that the days of my life that have passed have begun to outnumber the days to come. I have less of a future than I have of a past -

Yikes.  This odd, daunting realization has added a whole new dimension to my solstice soul-seaching.

So now it’s no longer just the prospect of a bi-annual “new year” and the usual freak-out.  Now I can also obsess about having fewer new years to obsess over.  Which might, in an alternative universe, be viewed as a positive, but just freaks me out even more. 

So what does one do with this, the realization that more of one’s life has been lived than has yet to be lived?  That there is less to come, than has come and gone?

Hmmm. As per usual, I had my initial knee-jerk reaction:  What’s lost.  What I never had, or will never have again:  My youth.  Time.  The possibility of a “real” acting career. Birthing a child.  Wearing white at my wedding.  Having a wedding …

No doubt you have your own list of to-date unrequited requests and unfulfilled options. 

It was around summer solstice time that I first began to look in the mirror and see changes in my concept of myself, a face reflecting back different than the one I had come to expect.   For decades I was fortunate in that, without any surgical, chemical or hormonal intervention, my body and spirit showed little sign of the changes of age.  Until, suddenly, it did.  Those of us who live in the modern western world, especially we women, have been well-trained to dread the transition to the second half of life, especially as it begins to show up physically in the body.  We’re taught that these changes signal the beginning of the end! The loss of our edge – our youth, our sass, our relevance, our value.  No need to go through the litany of laments people have about aging, or complain about my particular “problem areas.” But when even your best go-to features begin to morph (for example, new beauty marks keep popping up, so ubiquitous that they’ve become oxymoronic), it shocks the system.

So who is this new person looking back in the mirror?  Will she buy into the belief that  her edge - her youth, her sass, her relevance, her value – has officially begun to fade like the waning hours of daylight, and will soon fall away like autumn leaves?  Or will she learn how to master the new version, Tess 2.0?  Updated and improved after years of research, experience, application … ?

The choice is entirely mine to make.

Around New Year this year (shortly after the winter solstice) I inexplicably, spontaneously, instinctively began a comprehensive apartment cleaning venture.  Every drawer, every shelf, every cabinet, every closet, every file got the once-over.  Cleaned, dusted, organized, and if necessary, purged.  Took until June to finish.  Start-to-finish, a solstice-to-solstice project. Cleared out the no-longer-necessary, the unusable, the unhealthy, the unproductive, the unholy, the antiquated. As if intuitively knowing it was time to honor this transition, prepare for something new and exciting, make way for Part 2.

Then in early June, when the solstice-related revelation that the days - my days - are indeed diminishing, first triggered an intense period of beginning-of-the-end “Bonjour, Tristesse!” Of “WTF!”  Of “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”  Until another more important revelation shone through:  Actually, this is the lush mid-summer of life.  Peaking, in full bloom.  Flowing next into fall, perhaps the most brilliantly beautiful (if melancholy) season, time to harvest, share and enjoy the fruits of a life well lived.  The magnificent swan song before the advent of winter.  Until the next big solstice -

So please forgive me if this year I’ve done more A-Musing ranting than usual, as I get my house in order, actually and metaphorically.  Guess I must have instinctively known that I needed to get out it all of my system, this junk, this stuff, these beliefs. Keep what matters, treasure that which serves.  But rid myself of the detritus of the past.  Make room for something really spectacular. So that post-summer solstice can be a time when things really start getting interesting. Because now more than ever, less is more.  As I embark on the second half of life, now knowing who I am, what I have to offer this world, what I’d like to invite into it, every day counts, every day even more precious than the previous one, all the days of our life …