Anne Shirley, in the novel Anne of Green Gables, famously declares,

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?  A perpetual summer.  I wonder, when the start of summer break comes on Thursday, how do you suppose you will spend it?

Largely in leisure, I hope.  But not in that empty and distorted sort, which confuses laziness or idleness for true leisure.  

In an episode of a favorite television show of mine, one of the characters loses his job, and gets 3 months’ severance pay.  So, he declares it to be “The Summer of George”—a time in which he never changes out of his pajamas or leaves his apartment, constantly asks his friends to come visit him so that he doesn’t have to go anywhere, and calls his friend on the phone to find out what is happening in the world.  He imagines the ultimate form of leisure to be sitting in a recliner eating snacks and watching movies all day by himself.  

Josef Pieper says that “Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.”  It is conversation with a friend, reading a good book, a stroll at dusk with your dog, a visit to the museum.  In other words, leisure is not doing nothing—it is doing the best, most beautiful things for no reason other than that they are good.

Summer break is so close—I imagine you can almost taste it.  The start of June is right around the corner.  If you, like Anne, “wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June,” just remember…a world of never-ending June isn’t worth much if all you do is nothing; summer won’t be that great unless you bother to actually live in it.

Have a wonderful last Monday of the year.