Remember when the arrival of summer was looked upon with sighs of relief ? Families got to slow down from the hectic schedules of a busy school year. Vacations were scheduled in advance with great anticipation. Trips to the beach and pool were the highlights of the day. Afternoons were filled with ice tea, lemonade and the arrival of the ice cream truck! Well, summer arrived on time and in the same usual way. Today’ s summer schedules, however, are another story! There are still the weddings, reunions, 4th of July family traditions and occasional other scheduled commitments. But now we have the basketball, soccer, track, softball, baseball, football, tennis, horseback riding, golf, swimming lessons, clubs, day camps, and tournaments! How did they get in there? Where did the marbles, lawn darts, backyard badminton, 10 cent kool aide stand,kick the can, skins and shirts and running through the sprinkler go?

As a motivational speaker, I am oftentimes comparing life as it used to be with life as it is whether talking about summertime activities and schedules of yesteryear and today or the proverbial “when I was a kid, I used to walk five miles to school in a foot of snow in the winter time.” When I was a pre-teen, songs like “Summer time, summertime, summ- summ – summertime”or”Roll out those lazy,hazy, crazy days of summer…” topped the charts. My folks, not unlike many others, used to say to turn that noise down.  I swore that I would never do that. Nowdays, I cannot even hear or recognize lyrics for the heavy base beat and rhythm of wrap. And guess what? Somewhere between the doorway markings of height growth and near retirement I have become them! And there is no one precise moment or life changing experience that marked this metamorphosis. Rather, it seems to be a cumulative effect and you kind of end up going from someone’s son or daughter to being a parent to parenting your parent  and it all comes full circle.

These kinds of comparisons are fun fodder for speaking to audiences of all ages. On the one hand, one can see the younger people looking like” not me;”  the middle aged people nodding in identification; and the seniors with  keen recognition registering in their eyes.  The audiences and the occasions will vary from corporate leadership training, corporate sales training, social work advocates, teachers getting ready to start the school year, to a dentist hosting a wine seminar for his employees as a thank you event and too many more to enumerate And though the groups and the settings vary, the shared human experiences of “then and now”   are universal.

As a public speaker, it is both fun and rewarding to tap into the ” thens and nows”  of our lives.  Changes in summertime activity served as the catalyst for this message. We could go on with fall, winter and spring both in terms of seasons and in terms of  stages of life. Much grist for the mill…let’s talk.