It wasn’t only what happened around me this summer. It was what shifted within me.
Audio version:
As summer slips away, I keep coming back to one thought: this was the best summer of my life. And I find myself wondering why.
That’s a big deal for me. I am not one for superlatives. You won’t often hear me say something was the best or the worst, the most or the least. I tend to live in the in-between, where most of real life actually happens. I so often rely on nuance, and I have long believed that living my best life means leaning into the concept of opposites.
What I mean is simple, even if it took me years to understand. Joy and sorrow are not strangers. They often sit at the same table. Think of a wedding, where tears of happiness mingle with an ache for the ones who aren’t there to see it. Or watching a child grow up, feeling proud and wistful in the very same breath. Or a quiet morning with tea that feels peaceful precisely because the week before was so full. We rarely get one feeling at a time. Life hands us the whole bouquet, thorns and petals together.
For a long time I thought the goal was to have more of the good and less of the hard. But I’ve come to see that the hard is often what gives the good its depth. Life can be gritty, challenging, and wildly magnificent all at the same time, and I have learned to hold all of it, not as a contradiction to fix, but as the texture of a life fully lived.
So you can imagine my surprise. Here I sit in this Equinox week, when day and night stand in perfect balance, the one moment each season when neither light nor dark has the upper hand. It feels like the most fitting time to take stock. And as I look back over these past months, with all my love of nuance and my distrust of big declarations, I feel it clearly and without hesitation: this was, hands down, the best summer of my life.
I want to understand why. Not just to savor it, but because I suspect what I found might be worth sharing.
There are contributing factors, of course. My son’s wedding and his 40th birthday. More than forty years of marriage to my beloved. My daughter coming home to the East Coast after so many years away. Three visits from my sister, who lives across the country. And my mother, at 97, still here, still with me, and all the quiet gifts that have come from our healing as mother and daughter. So many more moments I could name, each one a small miracle I did not take for granted.
But what has me most curious is not what happened around me. It is what happened within me. There was an inner settling this summer, a peace and a sheer flow I had not known in previous seasons. Life did not stop stirring things up. People still said things that landed sideways. Plans still shifted. Old triggers still came knocking. What changed was how I met them.
Whenever something stirred me, I began asking one simple question: What if I could turn this around and not feel icky, angry, or take it personally? And then, gently, a second question: What would that look like?
It sounds almost too simple. But each time I asked, something softened. The question created a pause, and in that pause I found a little room to breathe. Room to wonder what the other person might be carrying. Room to notice that my reaction was often an old story, not the present moment. Room to choose ease instead of armor. I didn’t always get it right, and I didn’t pretend the hard feelings weren’t there. I simply stopped letting them steer.
What I discovered is that so much of what we suffer is not the moment itself but the weight we add to it. When I set that weight down, even a little, the joy of the summer had space to rise to the surface. The celebrations felt fuller. The conversations felt truer. I was actually present for my own life.
So as we cross this threshold into autumn, a season that asks us to release what we no longer need, I am carrying this question with me like a smooth stone in my pocket.
And I wonder about you. What is one moment this summer that you might turn around, and what would it look like to meet it with a little more ease?
As forever, my love from my corner by the sea,
Sarah
