Summer Light and The Human Imagination
Our lives should feel lighter and filled with the suffocating hope that something great is about to happen. Afterwards, it is summer. The air is warm, our skin turns a shade darker, and our locks begin to grow lighter at the very ends. There is no better feeling than creating during the summer. One could find inspiration at every corner, right or wrong, in every conversation and in every small decision. There’s always a story there.
The extended hours of daylight have the gentleness of stripping us of our excuses. During the early hours, there is always a reason to put off our creativity: an email to write, a task to do, or the noise of other people cohabiting our space. At sundown, the chorus falls silent. When we finally find ourselves with nothing to manage, and there is still light outside, the mind is free to wander. On the sensory level, the twilight narrows the visible world. It is an easier time to confess, to jump, and to create. It’s when productivity ceases to be the measure of a person’s worth. One is no longer useful, no longer ‘productive’. Which sets the desire free, said desire that during the day it is usually disguised as ambition, routine, or responsibility.
Physically, the body is now more tired and lets the rational guard down. We get to think less and feel more.
Technically, we know that there are fewer hours of darkness during summertime. The day stretches until 9 pm, and this delays the moment when we switch off. We get to spend extra hours in a prolonged twilight, an antechamber between the productive wakefulness of the day and the gentle let-go of the night. There is a line of research, the Mind After Midnight hypothesis, which argues that the same circadian clock that sharpens our thinking during the day, also dulls the mechanisms that keep that thinking in check at night. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for caution, analysis and social filtering, does not switch off. It loses its rhythm, judgment becomes clouded and our internal editor that filters our words and feelings before they reach the surface, begins to falter.
During summer, this process doesn’t simply disappear just because the sun is still high in the sky at 8pm. Instead, we shift the anticipation of the night, the letting down of our guard, the loosening of our inhibitions, into hours that still feel sociable, that still feel like daytime. It isn’t the warm weather or the heat of the moment. It is the light deceiving the body about what time it is, while the brain has already begun to release the brakes.
We have no choice but to let our creativity and hidden emotions loose during the summer, and we should use it as fuel to create more.
By Margarida Chagas