Mindful thumb twiddling

I don't like summer.
July and August are my least favourite months of the year and May and June aren't much better.
The only redeeming feature of summer is the warm, light evenings. Those can stay, the rest can go. I think of summer as a temporary, unstructured waiting time and I don't like it, not one bit. I like to have Things To Do, and I get befuddledly flummoxed when I am presented with a whole day and no work-related tasks, let alone interminable weeks and months. (I do usually teach in the summer but only for a couple of months and it's hardly full time. And I do seek out things to fill in the gaps but it's not easy to find.) I was feeling particularly purposeless today when I stumbled upon this article by someone else who has a hard time doing nothing that has saved my day - that and the approaching-warm sunshine that means I can sit outside and read.
In times gone by I would have said the timing of finding this article today was God speaking to me. Then I would have said it was happy coincidence and these days I think they're probably the same thing. Either way, I'm grateful, and gratefulness, it turns out, is key (along with an appreciation of dried fruit). The other keys are mindfulness and 'embracing our shadow', the latter being a common theme of mine. She quotes from Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach that I'd now like to read.

Brach's approach to the shadow is wonderful and compelling. She suggests that all of us want so much to be loved and accepted that we try to bury our dark impulses. We try to "ignore our anger until it becomes knots of tension in our body; cover our fears with endless self-judgement and blame." (54)

"Our shadow," Brach writes, "is rooted in shame, bound by our sense of being basically defective."

The solution? Stop running away from the dark side. Brach tells a wonderful tale to illustrate her point: "A traditional folktale tells the story of a man who becomes so frightened by his own shadow that he tries to run away from it. He believes that if only he could leave it behind, he would then be happy. The man grows increasingly distressed as he sees that no matter how fast he runs, his shadow never once falls behind. Not about to give up, he runs faster and faster until he finally drops dead of exhaustion. If only he had stepped into the shade and sat down to rest, his shadow would have vanished."