Inspired by Melissa Kirsch’s “Season Opener” (The New York Times, June 21, 2025)
Today is the year’s longest day.
Tonight will be its shortest night.
Summer has begun—not the calendar’s version, but the real one: sun-drenched, sweat-slicked, fragrant with sunscreen and smoke from a distant grill. The air thickens. The heat gathers. It is time to plunge into water, to float, to swim, to feel coolness wrap itself around your skin like a brief absolution.
And beyond the obvious joy of escape from heat, there is a quieter miracle: in water, phones become irrelevant. Swimming is one of the last places where the digital world cannot follow you.
(Yes, fine—there is always the bathtub. But if you are scrolling in the bath, perhaps something more essential has already been lost.)
The summer I dream of during the long grey months is a season stripped of screens. It is a return to physicality, to presence. Skin warmed by sunlight. Sand scratching the soles of your feet. The simple pleasure of eating an icecream. The ever-present scent of fruits and flowers.
There is no phone in this imagined world. No alerts. No endless scroll. No device humming for attention like a spoiled child.
Because few things sever us from the present moment as ruthlessly as the phone.
I have been reflecting on that strange, dislocated sensation that comes when you finally lift your eyes from a screen. It is a moment of mental jet lag. You blink, unsure of where you are. For those minutes, you had left the world behind—your body present, your mind elsewhere. A pocket-sized exile.
And each time it happens, something is lost. A glance. A moment. A sensation. A chance to be.
We all know this. Yet we return to our devices as if drawn by some invisible tether.
But why do we blame only the phone? Why do we treat our online life as the singular thief of presence?
Is a book not just as immersive, just as capable of pulling us into another world?
What reader does not keep two or three books open, to be chosen depending on mood, energy, or weather?
Is reading not a form of delicious disconnection?
Perhaps the difference lies in tempo. In the breathless flicker of the online world, where stories vanish in seconds, and attention is re-routed before it can settle. There is no lingering. Only swiping. Perhaps that is what unsettles us: the rapid churn, the absence of depth.
And yet, I write my own reflections during brief pauses—between meetings, in lifts, while waiting for coffee.
If writing can happen in those liminal moments, why not reading, too?
Maybe the issue is not focus or distraction. Maybe it is not about concentration at all.
Maybe the deeper difference is this: books and phones engage the mind. But only one of them ignores the rest of the body.
Our screens steal not just attention, but sensation. They mute the world.
And in summer, this theft feels somehow more acute.
Because summer is not meant to be watched.
It is meant to be lived.
The light lasts longer. The air invites us to stay.
After the daily errands are done, there is still time—time to lie in the grass, time to trace leaves with your gaze, time to do nothing and feel everything.
In the city, the sun ripples on the asphalt in strange, shimmering waves. The roses bloom as if they have something to prove. Even the heat has texture—thick, mineral, and alive.
Why would you choose to miss a moment of that?