I have been longing for summer.
It seems strange to say this as the sun beats down and the Tagus glistens a deep blue below the city. Temperatures next week will hit 38°C — upper 90s in Fahrenheit. A smoky haze settles over Lisbon as fires in the north devastate rural areas and mountain villages. Local friends are off, like migratory birds, to their annual family getaways: the same group, the same summer house, the same beaches, the same restaurants, year after year. Soon Lisbon will empty of its locals, leaving mostly sunburned tourists to crowd the esplanades.
The rhythm, the routine, the rituals — that’s what signals summer here. And it’s not really the season I’m longing for. It’s the feeling.
Summer, as an idea, evokes dripping popsicles and the slap of flip-flops on hot pavement. Splashing in a pool. A book beside a babbling creek. Sunsets from a porch, a screen door slamming shut, the smell of coconut suntan oil (SPF 2 — my god, what were we thinking?). Gatherings around the grill, late-night dances under a full moon. That’s the summer that lives in me: the one from growing up, from young adulthood, sights and sounds and smells I still measure every July against.
But underneath the nostalgia, I think what I’m actually longing for is joy without a caveat. Happiness with abandon — no asterisk, no footnote. Deep laughter that doesn’t feel like an act of rebellion. A carefree afternoon without alerts or breaking news. A guilt-free unavailability.
So I’ve started practicing for it.
I take a digital Sabbath most Sundays — no news, no social media, no email, and I try to hold off on texts too, though that’s harder with friends scattered across time zones. Recently I set limits on my phone that lock me out of social media and news once I hit a daily quota. The numbers it showed me were sobering: hours, days, a meaningful fraction of a life, draining into a digital cesspool I’d barely noticed filling up. Now I find myself doing the math in reverse — what if six days were offline and only one day on the device? How different would the shape of my life actually be?
I’ve also started buying paperbacks again, from the English-language bookstores that have begun to sprout around the city. I’d forgotten the specific satisfaction of closing a book when I finish it — no app cheering me on, no prompt to leave a review or announce the feat to friends, no algorithm queuing up what I should buy next from a billionaire’s warehouse. Just the book, closed, done. It is a small thing. It has done more for my sense of self than most of what I do with my time.
This, I’ve realized, is the real practice: not escaping to summer, but learning to be as present inside my actual life as I imagine I’d be inside a nostalgic one.
Which is, I think, why the coming turn of the season has been sitting with me differently this year.
We’re approaching the midpoint of summer — Lammas Day, August 1, the old beginning of the harvest. On the Celtic calendar it’s Lúnasa, traditionally marked with feasts and gatherings. Fall is coming. The shadows are already a little longer. Even the swallows are fewer in the sky.
As summer tips toward autumn, I find myself circling what the Portuguese call saudade. The writer Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608–1666) described it as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy” — the exact intersection of melancholy and nostalgia. It turns out saudade isn’t only for summers past. It’s also, I’m discovering, a decent word for the feeling of approaching a threshold in your own life and looking at both sides of it at once.
Because I’m approaching a milestone birthday — the kind after which every birthday is a milestone of sorts. My personal autumn. In Hindu tradition, this phase is called vānaprastha, the “forest dweller” stage: a period of handing the reins to the next generation and stepping into an advisory or mentoring role, with a greater emphasis on inner growth than outer achievement.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed no shortage of books, websites, and influencers — hello, algorithm — telling people at this stage to “roar” into their next chapter, to write their most productive act yet, to prove their continued usefulness or else fade into irrelevance. I understand the impulse behind that message, and some days I even feel it. But I don’t think it’s the only honest answer to this phase of life, and I’m not sure it’s the wisest one.
In From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks writes that Cicero believed three things about growing older: that it should be devoted to service rather than idleness, that our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, and that our natural role becomes counsel — mentoring, advising, teaching. I find that framing more useful than “roar forward,” because it doesn’t ask me to keep sprinting in the same direction. It asks what I’ve learned that’s worth handing to someone else, and how I want to spend my remaining attention. Those are different questions, and I think they lead to different lives.
It’s tempting to dive headfirst into the “design your next chapter” buzz, and I’ll admit I’m wrestling with a tangle of ideas about what mine could look like. Some feel unreasonable — the kind you’d label “careful what you wish for” if a friend proposed them to you. One night I found myself seriously researching woodworking courses so I could apprentice with a furniture maker, of all things, just to work with my hands and stop being the expert in the room for a while. Other days I wonder if I’m doing the opposite: squelching a real calling by aiming too small, too safe, too legible. Is what I’m chasing an aspiration, or is it a vocation? Those aren’t the same question, and I haven’t answered it yet.
I don’t think I need to answer it this summer. I think I just need to stay present enough — phone down, book open, attention unrationed — to actually hear the answer when it comes.
I stand on the edge of my autumn forest, living the question of summer.
If you’re standing on an edge of your own this year — a birthday, a transition, a quiet sense that the old rhythm no longer fits — I’d love to hear what your version of this question looks like.