Make Hay

Last week, my friend Tony introduced me to a term I’d never heard: sunshine guilt. It’s apparently what happens when you look out the window on a spectacular day, realize you’re sitting inside, and immediately picture some future February version of yourself demanding to know what on Earth you were thinking. Tony had barely finished explaining the concept before I looked out the window at the blue August sky. The Sun was calling.

As regular readers know, I’ve spent years trying to relieve parents of a different but related seasonal affliction, raspberry guilt. I wrote about it a few years ago after my friend Anne confessed that every summer she has grand plans to harvest her garden diligently, but life gets busy, some fruit always remains on the vine, and she feels guilty about every unpicked berry. Family life presents the same impossible harvest every summer: There are always more festivals, hikes, concerts, and sunsets than we can possibly fit into our lives. My advice about this is the same as about the garden: Relax! You can’t pick everything, and you shouldn’t even try. Banish raspberry guilt!

But sunshine guilt offers a useful counterweight. You can’t pick all the raspberries, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick any. Sometimes inertia needs a little shove. The couch is comfortable. The screen is interesting. Getting everyone’s shoes on can seem disproportionately difficult. And yet sometimes the Sun is shining and the air is perfect. Last week, I could hear February Deb whispering that I should push away from the desk and heed the call of the wild. I obeyed.

We don’t need to wring every possible experience from every beautiful day. But when the universe hands you perfect weather, especially on the cusp of the changing of the season, sometimes it’s worth reorganizing your priorities. When the couch and the sunshine are deadlocked, let February You cast the deciding vote.

—Debra Ross, publisher

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