The Last Full Week

I am writing this on approximately seven hours of sleep.

Not last night.

Since Friday.

Collectively.

Coffee and I will be renewing our vows this morning.

I'm not entirely sure what's happening lately.

Last week, the days refused to line up correctly with the calendar.

This weekend, apparently sleep decided it no longer needed to participate.

According to my Fitbit, from Friday morning until this morning I managed somewhere around seven hours total.

That's low.

Even for me.

That's very low.

Yesterday it finally caught up with me.

I decided to take a nap.

Maybe an hour.

Just enough to reset and keep moving.

Three and a half hours later, I got back up.

According to Fitbit, less than half of that was actually sleep.

I'm beginning to think my watch and I have different definitions of rest.

Either way...

I'm feeling it this morning.

Exhausted or not, Monday arrived carrying something I wasn't quite ready for.

This is our last full week of summer.

Not summer according to the calendar.

Summer will technically hang around for a while.

There will still be hot afternoons.

There will still be lake days.

There will still be plenty of reasons to complain about the North Carolina heat.

But this is the last full week of summer as our family currently knows it.

Next week, the rhythm changes.

The boys start school in the middle of next week.

That means this week we start moving bedtime.

We start moving wake-up time.

We finish gathering the last few things they need.

Before long, my wife and two sons will need to be out of the house by 7:30 every morning.

At about the same time, Zoey will be sitting down to begin her school day.

Asher gets a little more time before his year begins.

And I'll be sitting here listening to a house that suddenly sounds very different.

There are things we want to do this week.

Some to celebrate.

Some to prepare.

Some probably just because we're not quite ready to let summer go.

There are also all the normal things.

The house needs attention.

The yard desperately needs to be cut before another combination of rain and heat makes that impossible.

Groceries need to happen.

Oil changes need to happen.

Work certainly isn't stopping because summer is ending.

Life keeps being life.

We're also meeting with a pastor this week as we continue exploring a church for our family.

That's another conversation about what comes next.

Another small piece of the future taking shape while everything else is moving around us.

Then there's school.

Mine.

While the kids are preparing to begin another school year, I'm approaching the end of one.

This is week seven of my two eight-week classes.

Which means...

Final projects.

For Sociology, I'm going back to Fight Club.

Not to review the movie.

Not to decide whether Tyler Durden was right or wrong.

I've spent the last several weeks learning to watch a movie I've seen before through eyes I've never used before.

The eyes of a sociologist.

Suddenly, the narrator's apartment isn't just an apartment.

His obsession with furniture isn't just a joke.

Project Mayhem isn't simply where the story goes.

Alienation.

Consumerism.

Masculinity.

Identity.

Power.

Deviance.

Different sociological theories ask different questions about the exact same scenes.

Change the lens...

And the movie changes with it.

Now I have about fifteen minutes to bring all of that together into a final podcast.

A movie I've known for years has become something completely different because I learned another way to look at it.

I love that.

Anthropology has done something remarkably similar.

Just in the opposite direction.

For that final, I'm developing a tourism proposal through an anthropological lens.

Seven to nine pages bringing together culture, folklore, history, land, and the people who actually live inside the place other people want to visit.

The challenge isn't simply figuring out what tourists should see.

It's learning how to look at a culture without reducing it to something meant to be consumed.

Years ago, when I was beginning my journey into anthropology in Reading, Pennsylvania, I watched a documentary called Box of Treasures.

It stuck with me.

The film treated culture, history, identity, and memory as things belonging to living people rather than artifacts belonging to the past.

That changed how I thought about anthropology.

Now, years later, I find myself trying to do something similar.

In Sociology, I'm using a movie as a way to understand society.

In Anthropology, I'm using what I've learned about a culture to understand how we should approach the people who live within it.

One begins with something familiar and asks me to look deeper.

The other begins with something unfamiliar and asks me to look more carefully.

Both have taught me essentially the same thing.

How we choose to look at something changes what we're capable of seeing.

I've thoroughly loved both of these classes.

And now I somehow have to take everything they've taught me and convince it to fit neatly inside two final projects.

No pressure.

Somewhere in the middle of thinking about everything coming this week, I did something else that is very much me.

I looked way ahead.

Way, way ahead.

I temporarily booked my time off for the end of the school year.

There's a reason for that.

We're looking forward to taking our first real family vacation.

Not a couple of days squeezed between ten thousand things we have to accomplish.

Not traveling because something else requires us to travel.

A vacation.

A real one.

The first one that feels like that since our honeymoon.

That's how I tend to work.

I find the marker.

I put the reward on the horizon.

Then I march toward it.

When things get difficult, I know where I'm going.

There is something waiting on the other side.

But this morning I caught myself.

I'm already looking toward the end of a school year that hasn't even started yet.

Meanwhile...

I'm standing inside the last full week of summer.

That's the danger of always looking toward the next marker.

Sometimes you forget you're standing inside something you're eventually going to miss.

This wasn't exactly the summer we planned.

There were things we wanted to do that never happened.

Places we didn't go.

Memories we thought we'd make that we didn't.

My ankle certainly changed some plans.

I still don't trust it enough to make the trip down the gravel and sand to the lake, brace or not.

Hopefully soon.

The kids haven't let that stop them.

As long as the weather cooperates even slightly, I know my wife will have them down at the lake.

Swimming.

Playing.

Holding onto summer in the way children naturally know how to do.

They don't need a calendar to tell them whether summer is ending.

If the water is warm enough...

It's still summer.

Maybe they're better at this than I am.

Because I'm already looking toward school.

Final projects.

Work.

Church.

Fall baseball.

Appointments.

Housework.

The yard.

The end of the school year.

The vacation waiting somewhere beyond all of it.

Always the next marker.

Always the next thing.

But not yet.

This week deserves to be lived first.

We still have a few things to prepare.

We still have responsibilities.

The alarms will start getting earlier.

The machinery of fall has already started turning.

But there is still lake water.

There are still late mornings.

There are still evenings without homework.

There are still moments waiting to become the memories we didn't know we were supposed to make.

This wasn't the summer we planned.

That's okay.

Because when I look backward, the memories we did make were good.

Really good.

And we're not finished yet.

We have one full week.

One more week before backpacks head out the door.

One more week before the house gets quieter.

One more week before the rhythm changes.

Next summer will come.

That vacation will come.

All of those things I've placed on the horizon will eventually arrive.

But I don't need to march toward them today.

Today...

It's still summer.

There is nothing wrong with looking forward to something. Goals give us direction, and sometimes having a reward waiting on the horizon is exactly what gets us through the difficult stretches between here and there. The problem comes when we spend so much time looking toward what's next that we stop noticing where we are. Some seasons don't announce when they're about to become memories. They simply end, and suddenly we find ourselves wishing we had paid a little more attention while we were still inside them. There will always be another thing to prepare for. Another deadline. Another goal. Another season waiting ahead. But before we get there, we should probably make sure we've finished living this one.

Much love.

Stay safe.

Wash your damn hands.

And I will see you, next time.