A month that lives up to its name… if you let it

By Ivan Morgan

You have to ease into August.
I love August. Deep summer. The weeks after the Regatta (which was in late July this year for some strange reason). I was born in August.
August is the end of my year. There are lots of new years in the calendar – January 1st, Chinese New Year – but my new year has always been September, after Labour Day, the start of the school year. That’s when my year begins.
So August, for me, is the last, best month of the year. Like I said, you have to ease into it. Like us all, I had to work most of the Augusts of my life, but as I got older, I began to figure out ways to take more and more of August off.
The French take August off. In France, August is traditionally the month where the large cities are emptied as folks escape to the coastlines and country. Le Grande Vacances. Not everyone of course, but a surprising percentage. I love that idea, but it’s not in our culture.
August, for me, is the time when I try to become myself. Not the working me. Not the parent me. Just me. I try to find myself in the garden or on a beach with a book, with a device that plays rock and roll (once a transistor radio, now Spotify on my iPhone).
I was raised with a very strong work ethic. My parents saw to it that I was never a shirker, a clock watcher, or a wage slave; things my professional parents disdained. You did the best job you could, always, regardless of the wage, the conditions, the outcome. It wasn’t about money – it was about your character. These days they call it self-esteem. My people, all long gone, taught me to do your best because that’s what one did.
And that’s me today. Except in August. I trained myself over the years to take a chunk of that month to unravel. Try to take off the harness for a while.
I recommend it. Come September all the responsibility will come flooding back. That’s what September’s for. That’s not what August is for.
Nowadays the new generation call it work-life balance. In my day it was simpler, you worked, or you didn’t live. The idea now is to make sure your whole life is a tolerable mix between work and life. That may be a better approach. It sure wasn’t the reality in my day.
My wife and I have a secret seaside beach we go to. We loaf, swim, read and have a boil up. I like to spend a lot of August there. I have always threatened to take a tent and stay over, but in my dotage I do like my own bed. One August afternoon years ago, I was reading a book in a patch of cool, tall green grass by the ocean. I nodded off. Suddenly, over the soft lapping of waves on the shore, as I lay half awake in the afternoon sun, I heard a dog barking far away, the sound drifting across the water from the other side of the bay. At that moment, for some reason, for the first time in my life, I suddenly knew I was done with employment. Done done and done.
My kids say that’s the moment dad burned out. Perhaps.
Not finished working – hopefully that will only come with death – but working for others. I still work, but now it’s not for people, it’s with people – like this wonderful publication and my talented colleagues.
It took a few more months to extricate myself from my employment, but I retired, something I knew I’d never do. Something I always secretly feared.
Now I work for myself. I work at what I want. All this happened because of August.
Here we are now in the middle of another August, already being harassed by smiling faces on political lawn signs, people yelling about climate change, or Trump, or Carney or whatever, and Halloween stuff in the stores (in August for pity’s sake!).
Take no mind. All that is there to make you realize how important it is to sometimes just not care.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com