It’s About Time

Don’t want to read? Take a listen, here.

Teacher friends of mine have always said that summer is like a long weekend. June is akin to Friday – full of possibility, relaxation, and planning. July, a Saturday. Fun outings, travel, great meals, good naps. And August? Starts like a Sunday morning, easy. And then, it creeps up and you start getting the “Sunday scaries” deep into the August heat. It gets harder to enjoy the summer as you know the excitement of fall, but yes the obligations too, are just in reach.

I’ve never been a traditional teacher, but the joys of summer as a long weekend still feel true to me. If you’ve had a meeting with me in person or on Zoom the past couple of months, you might have seen “the couch.” I love this new outdoor couch we got – it looks like a regular, upholstered sectional. It is huge! It is so comfortable. It is quick drying. And it has turned our back patio into my favorite room of the house (yes, that includes the room with our Peloton bike and tread!). And it has been where I seem to be doing my best thinking.

I’ve written lots and thought even more about marking time, and ritual. And I find myself doing just that this summer. Creating a new morning ritual of coffee and first round of email checks on the couch. Zooms on the patio. (Don’t worry — I am still covered in sunscreen.)

But rituals aren’t just the small, pleasant kind. The coffee-on-the-couch kind is easy to keep. It’s the bigger rituals — the ones that require paperwork instead of patio furniture — that we tend to let slide. Time and intention – we resolve to update our financial plan, our estate plan, our philanthropic desires. Our ethical will. And so we self-impose deadlines. Sometimes, a false deadline is what we need to accomplish the things we know we need to do.

But let’s be honest about which deadlines we keep pushing. What places and causes are close to your heart that you still haven’t solidified — not just felt, but written down, funded, acted on? If you’re 70½ or older, are you actually using your qualified charitable distributions, or is that another line item you’ll “get to”? And that donor-advised fund — how is it helping anyone by just sitting there, accruing intentions instead of impact?

The truth about a DAF is that funding it is not a decision. It’s a delay dressed up as a decision. Which is fine, for a season. But at some point the season ends, and the sitting has to become giving.

There’s a book I’ve been reading this summer, on the couch, of course — Rabbi Alan Lew’s This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. The title alone stops me every time. Because isn’t that the truth about most of the deadlines we set for ourselves? We know the date is coming. We’ve known for months, sometimes years. And still, we arrive unprepared.

Lew is writing about the Jewish High Holidays — the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which Jewish tradition treats as an annual, unavoidable reckoning. Not a punishment, but a structure: a container that forces us to do the work we’d otherwise keep postponing indefinitely, whether or not we feel ready. You don’t have to be Jewish to recognize the shape of that. Every culture has some version of the deadline that doesn’t ask permission — a new year, a birthday, the start of school. That’s what a false deadline really is, I think. Not a trick we play on ourselves, but a container we build because we know we need one.

So — what’s holding you back? What do you want to accomplish this year, by the end of summer, before the container closes?

Sunday scaries are just the mind’s way of telling you the deadline is real. Let’s use it.

Shabbat Shalom,

Kari