H​appy Solstice Eve! Tomorrow is the longest day of the year. My favorite way to celebrate the Summer Solstice–besides a music festival–is to watch both the sunrise (5:20 am) and the sunset (8:32 pm). There will be over 15 hours of daylight! Watching the sun at the beginning and the end of the day emphasizes the amount of potentially productive time we have. What should we do with that much daylight? If we are in sync with Nature, a worthy goal in my mind, we are up with the sun. Fifteen plus hours a day is abundant! We can get a lot done. This is the time of year to bike early in the morning before it gets hot, to work in the yard in the evening. We can hike until 4 hours(!) after the sun sets in the winter. We can work until we drop, but we can’t sustain this level of activity. Understanding, embracing the long-ness of the day lends perspective. No matter how much we adore the long hot summer days, Nature is wise to limit them. We would exhaust ourselves if we could continue at our current activity level year-round. And let’s face it, we love long days because they are limited. If we look at the yin yang symbol, taijitu, we might understand the cycle of the seasons. Tomorrow, we sit at the apex of the white, the yang. Yang is active, hot, summer. After tomorrow, the days start getting shorter; we ease toward the black, the yin, winter. Understanding that long hot days are limited makes it easier to see them as the fleeting gift that they are. We think that summer just started, but in reality, the days start getting shorter on Monday. Tomorrow is the height of summer. Embrace every second. We get each moment exactly once.