You don’t have to make the most of every summer weekend

Summer comes with an oddly exhausting amount of pressure.

The weather forecast shows sunshine and suddenly it feels as though you should be doing something with it. There should be a barbecue happening somewhere. A beach trip. A picnic. A festival. Drinks in a beer garden. A beautifully spontaneous family day out where everyone wears linen, nobody argues and somebody has apparently remembered to pack strawberries.

Open social media on a sunny Saturday and the evidence becomes overwhelming. Everyone else appears to be making memories while you’re putting a load of washing on, doing the food shop or wondering whether spending the afternoon on the sofa would constitute wasting a perfectly good day.

But here’s something we perhaps don’t say often enough during summer: you don’t have to make the most of every weekend.

Sometimes you can just have a weekend.

Summer shouldn’t become another job

We spend so much of the year waiting for summer that when it finally arrives, there can be a strange sense of responsibility attached to enjoying it properly.

The days are longer. The weather is better. Children are off school. Holidays are happening. Invitations appear. There are only so many sunny weekends before autumn arrives, so we’d better squeeze absolutely everything out of them.

Except leisure stops being particularly restorative when it becomes another list of things we’re supposed to accomplish.

If Monday to Friday has already involved work, commuting, childcare, caring responsibilities, appointments, housework and the hundred small pieces of life administration that seem to reproduce overnight, you may arrive at Saturday needing absolutely nothing more ambitious than a cup of tea and nobody asking you a question for an hour.

That isn’t wasting your weekend. That’s recovering from your week.

And for people working in healthcare and social care, the concept of a traditional weekend may not exist anyway. Saturday might be a 12-hour shift. Sunday might be the day you finally sleep after nights. The beautiful sunny afternoon everyone else is enjoying might happen precisely when your body is telling you that it desperately needs rest.

Other people’s highlights aren’t your timetable

Summer can also amplify something we’re exposed to throughout the year: comparison.

We rarely see other people’s completely ordinary days. Nobody uploads 14 photographs of themselves cleaning the bathroom, arguing with their teenager about empty crisp packets or sitting in traffic on the way to Tesco.

We see the highlights.

During summer those highlights become particularly photogenic. Holidays, swimming pools, sunsets, garden parties, weddings, theme parks, beaches and smiling families appear one after another. Even when we know perfectly well that we’re seeing a carefully selected fraction of somebody else’s life, it can still create the uncomfortable feeling that everyone else is living more than we are.

You don’t need to respond by filling your own calendar.

Someone else’s lovely Saturday doesn’t mean yours needs upgrading.

Perhaps they needed the big day out. Perhaps you needed eight hours of sleep, a clean house and an afternoon reading a book. Both can be good weekends.

Rest doesn’t have to be earned

There’s another idea worth challenging: that rest is something we’re only allowed once everything else has been completed.

The problem is that everything is never completed.

There will always be another email, another cupboard that could be organised, another errand, another person you haven’t replied to and another useful thing you could theoretically be doing.

If you wait until you’ve finished absolutely everything before allowing yourself to properly switch off, you may be waiting for the rest of your life.

Rest isn’t laziness and it doesn’t need to be justified by complete exhaustion. You don’t have to reach the point where you’re running on fumes before you’re allowed an afternoon doing very little.

And doing very little doesn’t necessarily mean lying motionless on the sofa. Rest can be pottering around the garden, reading, cooking something you enjoy, taking the dog for a slow walk, watching a film with your children, sitting outside with a drink or having nowhere you need to be for a few hours.

The important part is that it isn’t another performance target.

A quiet summer still counts

Of course, make plans. Book the holiday. Go to the barbecue. Take the children somewhere they’ll remember. Say yes to the spontaneous evening out when you genuinely want to go.

Summer is wonderful precisely because it gives us opportunities to do those things.

But you don’t have to extract maximum value from every hour of sunshine.

There will be weekends where you do something brilliant and weekends where you barely leave the house. There will be summer evenings that become treasured memories and others where you’re in pyjamas by 7pm watching something you’ve already seen three times.

A good life contains both.

So, if this weekend arrives and you don’t particularly feel like making memories, improving yourself, going anywhere impressive or making the most of the weather, consider this your permission slip.

Cancel the imaginary itinerary. Put your feet up.

You aren’t wasting summer. You’re living it, and sometimes living it looks wonderfully uneventful.

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