Perpetual Summer
- Lynette Ritchie
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Why I’m not sitting this one out.
With retirement, every day feels a little like Saturday.
The alarm clock loosens its grip. The calendar softens. Deadlines dissolve. It’s less like stepping into decline and more like walking out of school for the last time — backpack dropped, doors flung open, light everywhere.
Perpetual summer.
At first, I slept. Deeply. The kind of sleep you don’t realize you’ve been missing until your body finally trusts you. It felt like setting down a backpack I’d carried for decades.
And then one morning, I woke up restored.
It was like that first morning of summer break — the whole day ahead and no one telling you what to do with it.
And if we’re honest, we remember something else too.
“Turn off the TV.”
“Go outside.”
“Go play.”
Maybe your mother said it. Maybe you said it to your own kids.
We all knew what it meant. Move your body.Use your imagination.Don’t waste the light or day. Somehow, we treat that instruction like it had an expiration date. It doesn’t.
Summer can drift. You can stay inside. Let the days blur into the mundane. Watch from the porch while others run toward the fun.
Or you can go outside.
For me, retirement didn’t close the playground. It reopened it.
Wide trails. Uneven rock. Long walks. Early mornings. Making friends in their 70s, 80s, even 90s who decided summer wasn’t for spectating. They’re exploring, lifting, stretching, learning, adapting. Not to prove anything. Just because the day is there.
And the day is worth using.
When I read Roosevelt’s words about the arena* —effort and error and daring — they don’t sound like a warning. They sound like summer instructions. There is no play without scraped knees.No effort without missteps.No memory without motion. Summer was never sterile. It was alive.
Every retirement looks different — just like every childhood summer did.
For some, it’s hiking, biking, or 4x4ing. For others, swimming laps, lifting weights, dancing, gardening, building, walking faithfully each morning.It might be a workshop, a church kitchen, or a grandchild on the floor. The playgrounds are different. Participation is the point.
I don’t eat well and move because I’m chasing perfection. I do it because this summer is worth fueling. Vegetables and protein aren’t virtue; they’re strategy. Strength training isn’t vanity; it’s capacity. Sleep isn’t laziness; it’s recovery for tomorrow.
Retirement gave me something unexpected: time. Time to cook real food.Time to train instead of rush.Time to rest without apology.Time to go again.
As kids, we didn’t skip supper if we wanted to ride bikes until dark. We didn’t stay up all night if we wanted to run hard the next day. We understood instinctively that play required preparation and a bit of sacrifice. This season does too.
Sometimes I want to call out from the swings:
“Come outside. The light won’t last forever.”
Not because anyone is doing it wrong.
But because this summer season of freedom is not fragility.
Perpetual summer isn’t a waiting room. It isn’t a slow fade. It’s open time.
And open time still whispers the same instruction it always has:
Come outside. Come play.
*From Theodore Roosevelt's speech, Citizenship in a Republic, 1910:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
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