Summer has a way of arriving with grand promises — rest, simplicity, long evenings — and then evaporating into a blur of overcommitment and screen glare before Labor Day even shows up. I’ve lost enough summers to know that the slow life doesn’t just happen. You have to reach out and take it by the hand.
Here are five things I’m actually doing this summer to stay present and sane.
1. Eat One Meal a Week Outside
Not a special occasion. Not a cookout with twenty people. Just a regular Tuesday lunch on the back steps with a sandwich and nowhere urgent to be. Something happens when you take a meal outside — the pace drops, you notice the birds, you stop staring at a screen. It costs nothing and returns more than you’d expect.
2. Keep a One-Sentence Journal
Full journaling is wonderful, but the blank page can become its own kind of pressure. This summer I’m trying something simpler: one sentence, every evening, describing the day. Not analyzing it. Not mining it for meaning. Just a single honest line. The tomatoes finally bloomed. My granddaughter called and told a terrible joke. It’s amazing how much a life accumulates in sentences.
3. Read Something Completely Outside Your Usual Territory
If you mostly read theology, try a novel. If you mostly read fiction, try natural history. The point isn’t self-improvement — it’s the mild, productive disorientation of a new neighborhood you didn’t know existed. I find it loosens my thinking in ways that staying in familiar genres never quite does.
4. Learn One Thing That Has No Practical Value
This summer I’m learning to identify a handful of local wildflowers by name. Not for any reason. Just because the world rewards the people who pay attention to it. Pick something — bird calls, cloud formations, knots, a few constellations — and give it twenty unhurried minutes a week.
5. Send One Letter by Mail
Not a text. Not an email. An actual letter, handwritten or typed, folded, stamped, and dropped in a blue box. It makes the recipient feel genuinely seen in a way that digital messages, however warm, rarely manage. And the act of writing slowly enough to fill a page will surprise you with what you actually have to say.
None of this is dramatic. That’s rather the point.