Hi there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 219, a mid-summer pet talk. We're halfway through July, halfway through a crazy year that followed the craziest year of any in quite a while I think, and I think our bodies and our minds might be feeling it.

So I just want to take a few short minutes for a quick pet talk.

First let's lay the groundwork of where we are. Summer is a season. Like obviously like a, you know, like a weather season but like a season of life.

And like any season it has a beginning, a middle, an end. I think the middles have a particularly unusual quality because they are far enough away from the beginning where things might have felt fresh and possible in any season.

Although some beginnings are also a bit scary and overwhelming and unknown in the beginning, but there's just a different kind of energy at a beginning.

But the middle is also too far from the end to have any kind of finality or knowing what the next season is supposed to be.

The middle is far away from everything. You're just, you're just in it. So to start I want to offer the tiniest bit of acknowledgement of that.

Middles can be difficult and challenging.

Another piece to this like particular middle that we're in right now is that it's the summer, slightly after, but also still in this pandemic.

Now I am not the first nor I will I be the last to say that this whole experience of the last year and a half has changed us and has taken things from us that we probably won't see for quite some time.

The emotional and physical and psychological toll this past season has taken is just something else.

So living in the summer and being in the middle of that summer after such a time that we have been in, it is just not an easy place to be.

Now summer for a lot of folks is out of the ordinary anyway if you think about it like if you're home with kids every day is the same, but also might feel like you have no routine.

It's very weird. It's a very weird paradox being a stay at home parent in the summer. If you're a working parent summer is bonkers because you still have to work and then figure out care for your kids and also get things done.

You want to hang out with them too and it's just so much stuff. If you don't have kids, the other adults in your life likely have fairly different routines and of availability in the summer simply because of the nature of the summer.

And so that doesn't feel normal to you like summer. I think by nature is singular and how it feels for most people. Now you might you might really love that singularity.

You might hate it. It might depend on when you're asked, but summer is generally out of the ordinary right. So if you think about being in an already out of the ordinary season after an extraordinary year.

It is very normal to feel far more tired than you usually do. Now I want to share something with you. It's a word picture that I shared with my therapist a couple weeks ago and it was so helpful to me.

And so that that's my pep talk as I'm going to tell you about my counseling appointment. You ready?

Okay, so imagine a lake. Okay, and it has a very clear border. It has a clear edge all the way around. And this lake is the embodiment of overwhelm.

You want to stay out of the lake because the water is metaphorically all the things in your life and one big overwhelming space. There's no distinction, right. It's just like a big lake full of everything.

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