Summertime and the Livin’ is Easy by Janet Jones
“Summertime and the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high.
Oh yo’ daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’,
So hush, little baby, don’ yo’ cry.”
Like the lullaby from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the word “summertime” holds so much joy for me. The cold, bare gloom of winter gives way to balmy sunshine and lush grasses and greenery. To me, it’s the cracking sound of a tennis ball hitting the racket strings, the whirr of my bicycle tires on the pavement and the chirps of the crickets and mixed up mockingbirds decorating the hush of a warm starry night.
In the summer, life is good—and so easy. Waking up on a July morning to sunshine and chirping birds from an open window is infinitely easier than dragging myself from the mountain of covers needed to keep me warm in January. Of course being “rich” and “good lookin’” can make things easier too, but we all know fame and fortune is no guarantee of happiness. I have read about many celebrities who despite their money and beauty, seem to “live lives of quiet desperation” as noted by Henry David Thoreau in his book, Walden.
So “easy” is very relative. What’s easy for me may mean months of suppressive heat for someone else—my own husband comes to mind. Sorry, Steve, that I can’t sleep with the air conditioning on without getting a headache.
My dad always loved summer too. He loved to plant and harvest his oh-so-sweet corn that we all devoured along with juicy red ripe tomatoes from the garden. But he also used to say, in his lazy southern drawl, “life ain’t easy Janet Marie, or fair…it ain’t supposed to be.”
I used to protest, of course. Why then do we all have a sense of wanting life to be fair or easy? Where is our frame of reference? Fairy tales? Romance books? But even the authors who write the happy endings must have experienced such a thing. Didn’t they? Don’t we want life to be easy and fair because it’s supposed to be? Thinking back, the great thing about my protest is that my mom and dad gave me a childhood that certainly seemed easy and fair to me.
What my dad was trying to teach me is that it is up to me, not life, to create the easy and the fair. Life gives us conditions, good, bad, or neutral and these are labeled according to the thoughts of whoever is experiencing it. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” according to the ancient saying. We are all different. Some of us thrive on public speaking and politics while others wither away in the limelight and only bloom in the solace of silence and seclusion.
This kind of diversity in people and events is what makes life a perfect classroom. We have to learn how to deal with what people and life throw at us every single day. If we throw back anger or despair, then we will just create more anger and more despair in our lives and in others. So what do we do? We do the only thing we have control over—we choose our reaction. If we react with love, instead of hate, then we fill our personal life with love and peace…even if we have no effect on the event or the person.
“…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.”
–Charles R. Swindoll
So thanks, Daddy. I think I get it now. I don’t have to change what people say or do or control what happens in order for life to be easier for me. I only need to realize that my attitude has the power to create an easier life. It’s the same attitude that makes lemonade out of the lemons of life. Since an endless summer is not about to happen here in Ohio …sigh…I need to make “the livin’ easy” by jumping in the autumn leaves, frolicking in the snow and dancing in the spring rain, until summertime rolls around again.
Yes Janet what you said about life is not easy is true. Your Dad was right so enjoy the rest of summer because Fall will soon be here and snow will be coming. Not looking forward to that.
Mom
Thanks Mother — and yes I will do my best to enjoy the rest of the summer!
Love,
Janet