The summer is looked forward to with eager desire and it is dismissed
without regret by the residents of the temperate zone. The explanation
lies partly, if not mainly, in our defective adaptation of ourselves
to the hot season. Charles Lamb once wrote, “The summer has set in with
its usual severity.” The wit covers a truth; we adjust ourselves so
imperfectly to the heated term that we suffer from the high temperature.
The art of living must include devices and cautions through which we
get the good and shun the evil of each season. Men are slowly learning
that to “enjoy life” on this planet one must pay the same price as for
liberty—“eternal vigilance.” The summer of the North ought to be our
golden time of health and enjoyment. We have the whole of the atmosphere
to breathe from—not bits of it let into artificially heated spaces.
There is shade for the noonday heats, and the evenings and mornings
for exercise and refreshment of muscular energy. But the hot hours are
often dangerous and the atmosphere may be poisoned by our own neglect
of decaying vegetables or animal matter. We must aim to keep clean and
keep all things about us clean; food should be lighter than in winter
(less heat-producing); exercise should avoid the hours of fervent heat;
the occupations should take a more leisurely pace; the scene of life
should, if possible, be shifted for some week or weeks so as to diversify
our mental interests and break the dreary monotony of long days spent
in one environment of body and soul. The word which describes the art
of summer life is _moderation_; but moderation is not indolence, though
there is a natural tendency to drop into the laziness which characterizes
barbarian humanity in hot lands. To be healthy and happy one should
resist the disposition to be idle. Neither health nor happiness come to
lazy people in any desirable measure. The best forms of both depend on
activity; but in summer it must be moderate and regular. If, then, one
has constant occupation, he should cultivate moderation of interest and
exertion, shun the blazing noontide, and take his food as well as his
exercise in reduced doses. Too much food, care, exercitation, these are
our northern summer dangers. Our civilization is yet very imperfect in
this region of art. We have attained to food, clothing, shelter. We do
not quite understand how to use them all wisely; but beyond these lie
the adjustment of exertion, rest, air, water, electrical and chemical
instruments of vitality, and the inner forces of our own being. Happiness
is the result of a complex mass of conditions and instruments of life
acting upon the spirit and reacted against by the spirit. Our knowledge
grows; but while it is growing we have to take for our text moderation,
and elaborate the sermon each man for himself.
The great opportunities of the year come to us in summer. Nature is all
alive to please and instruct us—to give us the delights of the eye and
the inspiration of study. The world has been dressed with infinite art,
to afford us a holiday which shall be full of instruction. We need travel
to widen our vision of God’s modern Edens dressed by human art. We need
an active intelligence, to see and understand the Eden world of summer.
But all depends upon our care of our bodies. Health is the condition of
all summer pleasures. Is it not strange that we will spend months and
years learning how to use lifeless tools, and yet will not spend needed
time to learn the management of this vital tool by use of which all
happiness comes to us? Let us all try this time to keep the instrument
of life in tune for the music of the summer; to make of the season of
highest opportunity all there is in it for ourselves. Starting with that
selfish purpose, we shall soon find that we need social food, and that
here also, “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Helping others
to enjoyment is the healthiest of “health movements;” for no tonic is so
spiritually exhilarating as the sight of other people’s happiness which
we have made. The man who sends a child out of the city suffocation
of summer time has a poor imagination if he can not enjoy the gambols
of that child in the country meadows and groves as he never enjoyed a
banquet in his own house. Doing as many generous actions as possible is
one way to get both health and pleasure out of the summer.