Summer. School is finally out, so the automatic response is, “I’m going to have so much free time!” and “Let the summer projects begin!” But here it is at the end of July already, and I’ve managed to be busy every single week from the end of school until now! Whether it was babysitting, at camp, or vacation, I haven’t been able to just sit down and breathe! Upon inquiry of some of my friends, I realized that I am not the only one inflicted with this problem, but it is actually quite common to overbook your summer.

So why exactly do we do this? I believe it is because we trick ourselves into thinking summer is actually longer than it really is. When school ends, September feels so far away; it’s almost too hard to look that far into the future. However, summer really is only three months out of the whole year, as opposed to the school year’s whopping nine months. Though how we manage to make three months seem longer than nine, I will never know.

Considering our misinterpretation of the length of summer, we tend to think that because of all the “extra” time we’re going to have, it is completely necessary to schedule something every day possible. Perhaps this is caused by a previous summer of boredom. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I planned almost nothing, and as a result, I was bored out of my mind. However, I soon discovered that it was not wholly bad, because the next summer was ridiculously busy! There is a delicate balance that is hard to find, but necessary to achieve.

One of the biggest problems with our warped sense of time in the summer is finding time to do summer assignments. Since we think we have so much time, the assignment gets pushed farther and farther back in the summer, because we don’t have time and/or are just procrastinating on it. Months turn into weeks, which turn into days, and before you know it, it’s the week before school starts and you have a whole summer’s worth of work to do.

Whether summer business is caused by previous boredom or misinterpretation of the length of summer, I think we can all benefit from slowing down; enjoy summer while it lasts!