How is your summer going so far? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you getting booked for lots of great gigs? Are new opportunities coming your way?

In this episode of the podcast, I revisit an earlier episode and share some additional thoughts on living and enjoying summer as a musician or music entrepreneur.

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Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – Revisiting the six types of summer

00:25 – No two years are exactly alike

00:55 – The types of summer I experienced last year

03:44 – Revisiting episode 51 of the podcast

13:37 – Wrapping up the episode

Transcription:

Last summer, I shared about the six types of summer on the podcast.

I decided to resurface this topic because I think it’s quite relevant, especially now that we’re into summer again.

Every year is a little different.

I was just talking to a client who shared with me that summer typically gives her the opportunity to rest and recuperate. This year, this hasn’t been the case.

We can carry a lot of expectations into each season based on what we experienced last year or in years past. But try as you might, there’s no way to carbon copy the experiences you had in years past and paste them into your current experiences. Even if you did, how you go through it now would vary and could even prove disappointing.

We can carry a lot of expectations into each season based on what we experienced last year or in years past.Share on X

As I look back, I can clearly see that last summer I was experiencing a summer of recreation, restlessness and restoration.

As I mentioned in the original episode, the different types of summer can interweave and overlap. So, for me, three different types of summer were playing out.

I’ll share a little bit about each here:

Recreation. Between late 2014 and summer 2016, my life was organized chaos. There was no time or room for a social life or entertainment. I would just binge watch Netflix in my spare time because I had no energy for anything else. In 2017, I made a new friend. That paved the way for a lot of activity during the summer – eating out, canoeing, hiking, getting out in nature, shopping and more.

Restlessness. Last summer, I was waking up to a new self. Or, maybe I was peeling back the layers as I shared in episode 70 of the podcast. I felt like a spiritual spotlight was on me, and it was incredibly uncomfortable. I found a fascinating article about restlessness or neurasthenia on The Art of Manliness. I’m going to quote a section from it here, because I believe it serves as a relatively accurate description of what I was experiencing: “[it’s] the gap between our expectations about the world and how we really experience it that causes our modern ‘neurasthenia’. New media and technology has seemingly brought the whole world just within our reach. But we can never seem to grasp it. We want to magically take it all in and we can’t. And so, we feel depressed and anxious. We are sure that unlike us, others have found a way to lay hold of all the good stuff out there. We have this feeling that somewhere beyond our life, real life is taking place. It feels as if there are so many possibilities and choices out there, so many that we’re absolutely overwhelmed by them. We don’t know where to start, where to dive in. We’re thus paralyzed, and don’t do anything. And then we feel shiftless and restless because we feel bad that we’re not doing stuff. Because there’s so much we should be experiencing! But then we feel overwhelmed again, and then, well, you get the idea.”

Restoration. Making a new friend and getting outside and enjoying the weather proved especially beneficial for my healing process. As I mentioned in the original episode, healing doesn’t always feel good when it’s taking place, and it didn’t. But I felt like a lot of what was lost in my youth was restored last summer.

With that said, this year is considerably different. As I’ve already shared,