Summer is great, isn’t it?
My nephew spent several weeks this summer at my parents’ house—his grandparents—and every single day was a new and unwritten story.
He got to run wild, eat all the Drumsticks he wanted, work in hayfields, play with a litter of barn kittens, and ride his mountain bike with his buddies. There were no hairbrushes, no schedules, no demands beyond work that involved big tractors, hydraulics, and gears.
As my sister was packing up to go home—they live in Europe— my nephew spiraled. “Please can we stay longer,” he begged his mother. “Please. I want to do this always.”
His angst was genuine. He’s fourteen and he feels things very deeply. “Please,” he cried.
My sister hesitated. The trees were full of leaves; the air was warm, the clouds white and soft. It was the very, very best kind of summer day. It was his best day. And her best kind of day, too.
I saw her hesitate. She was tempted—I could tell.
But then she shook her head. “We have to go back now,” she said, outlining her reasons. “Your father is there. School starts in a few weeks. It’s home. We have to go.”
It was painful to see his heartbreak. He ran off, furious and devastated. He stayed mad for a long time.
“I saw you hesitate,” I told her later. “What were you thinking in that moment?”
“Well, it was a perfect day. It had been a perfect week. I wanted to stay longer, too. But then I remembered that vacation isn’t like that all the time,” she said. “I thought about school and work. I thought about February, when it’s icy and gray and cold and nothing is easy.” She paused. “I needed to think about the contant balance of good days with hard days.”
It made me think about leadership, and of a simple truth I’ve tried to enact in my own life, both professionally and personally.
Never make big decisions on your best day, and never make decisions on your worst day. Make them on your medium days.
I don’t know about you all, but every summer, I want to find a way to live in perpetual summer. Find a long-term lease on a lake house. Rent a boat. Get a puppy. Move to Greece. Read a novel a day. Try to find a job where I can drink coffee on my patio until mid-morning.
But I don’t. Because life and work are fluid, with peaks and valleys, with a whole crapload of things that go wrong, with problems to solve and people who are grumpy. It’s unrealistic to think we can sustain the magic of a mid-summer afternoon forever. Instead, those perfect days are ones I soak in on a cellular level, taking snapshots in my mind to pull up when I’m having a very bad day.
Fortunately, most days are medium days. By definition, we only get a few absolute best and worst days, which leaves the rest of the calendar as fair game for steady, thoughtful progress.
As we transition from summer into the school year—I know a few readers from North Carolina already started their year!—it’s easy to mourn the dreams of freedom and a different life. But it’s also time to pour ourselves into a different kind of power: nine, ten, or eleven months of focus on making our schools even more amazing than they were before.
That’s all for now (but keep reading for a fun new offer from Echo Point Books and Media!)
Warmly,
Jen
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