The Languid Days
That lead to breakthroughs
August and the hot summer days of the northern hemisphere are upon us along with the season of languor. That dreamy idle state one might reach on a sunny beach with the sound of waves in the near distance or sleeping in a garden as bees buzz in the flowers nearby. In languor urgency falls away, time slows, and exhales lengthen and a more deeply relaxed state enjoys itself.
Over the course of my brief life, I’ve seen the garden gate to true languor closing for too many people. A late summer vacation was once a reliable moment for people to have a relaxing stretch before the world shifted into high gear again in September. Languor and deep relaxation is still part of the legend and promise of summer. The heat helps the body and mind relax when a person stops trying to do too much and surrenders to the beach towel or backyard hammock.
However, summer languor is now eluding people. Distracting smart phones tempt people away from the slow time this feeling needs. The doorway to this state requires some distance from stress and cheap distraction. Checking work messages at the beach puts the mind in the frequency of stress rather than the sun and waves. Languor requires a little boredom, a little deep focus and a lot of letting go of worries, to-do lists and fear. The difficult economic moment also plays a role. It was a lot easier to pay mortgages and afford gas and groceries a couple decades back for middle class families with both white and blue collar jobs. It’s hard to let go into that somnolent feeling of languor with economic fear reaching a boiling point. That economic pressure isn’t a problem for everyone but when it is present, this important rejuvenating state is more difficult to enter.
Culture too has moved away from reading long novels, putting big jigsaw puzzles together and embracing the mix of boredom and deep focus. According to the National Endowment of the Arts a little less than half of Americans reported reading at least one book for pleasure in the last year. While reading a novel on the beach is only one activity correlated with an experience of languor, it is a bell-weather for the kind of patience and relaxed focus that a languid week of rest and enjoyment requires. To put it succinctly, fewer people have the attention spans to relax with depth and imagination anymore.
A languid summer week is the friend of achievement and urgency. Deep relaxation is the ally that often comes before pushing beyond the limits of yesterday. Sometimes it takes a week of doing nothing with skill and beauty to find the capacity to change the world.
The enemy of getting those most important things done is not the languid gifts of summer. The enemy is distraction, it is that high level of baseline stress that means someone can never truly relax nor focus. The foe of accomplishment is not the vacation away but the fear, hyper vigilance and phone addiction of being connected all the time. Letting go and doing nothing more than a puzzle and reading a book could be the break one needs to truly start moving ahead again.
So I hope this month you find some languid afternoons. If you need help, try leaving your phone in the car when you go to the beach. Find a page turner novel and hammock. Put yourself in the way of some sunsets. Tune out so that you can tune back in again stronger in due time.
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Hansa
I no longer have kids at my house, but I do have books and try to set aside one or two hours a day for reading books, especially reading books outside beneath a maple tree. Here's to summer!