Fell into/A sea of grass/And disappeared among/The shady blades…
Children all/Ran over me/Screaming tag!/You are the one!”

Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction

So I’m just a bit late in the pronouncement, but hurrah! Summer is here. Time to break out the shorts, water guns, barbecue grills and enjoy the lazy season.

For me, summer never “officially” started until I played the song above by Jane’s Addiction. Beyond the title, the lazy guitar strums and floating lyric delivery always captured, for me, a sense of slowing down. And really, isn’t that what summer is all about?

We probably all need to slow down just a bit, lord knows that most of us work entirely too hard. The winter months foster that notion what with the driving winds and cold keeping one indoors – you just don’t want to do a whole lot of anything when it’s cold out.

But the winter chill has receded to summer’s warm glow and the time for vacations and camping trips is here. Did you know that according to the magazine “Business 2.0,” American’s give back a whopping 1.6 million years of unused vacation time every year and that the average America worker only gets 12.4 days of vacation annually? Those are staggering numbers and not anything that can be good for anyone’s health. Compare that with other industrialized nations where the average worker gets at least 30 days and I get the feeling we’re getting the short end of the stick here.

No matter how much you love your job, everyone needs a break from it. If for no other reason than to recharge your batteries and come back a week or two later recharged and ready to go again. That magazine I mentioned earlier said that according to a study conducted by the American Institute of Stress, 30 percent of us feel chronically overworked causing an estimated $300 billion dollars in accidents, employee turnover, diminished productivity and medical costs. Let me say that number again … $300 billion – that’s a lot of zeros.

In addition to getting away from the job, there’s the time we spend with family and friends when we take off. I know many of you, myself included, are thinking to yourself but I can’t afford to take the time off, or with the recession and everything to take any time off might jeopardize my job. I hear you, I really do but let me offer this – we need to take the time because of that. Who do you think is going to be their if the axe does fall? It’s going to be those friends and family that you took the time to nurture and develop a solid foundation with and a key part of that is getting out and having some fun. You don’t even have to go for what many of us think of as the typical vacation, going to Disneyland or some such. Indeed, stay at home, fire up the barbecue pit, sit on your porch and watch the kids play. Just take the time, take it off and recharge.