“But there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues…”
This familiar lyric is from the often covered 12-bar blues classic “Summertime Blues” recorded in the late ‘50s by young rocker Eddie Cochran and hitting number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 29, 1958.
Tragically, Eddie Cochran died in a taxicab wreck just two years after his song hit the charts. It quickly became an anthem of young angst and has been sung as an antiauthority rant in its various versions, from Rush to Rolling Stones, for most of our adult lives. And in its semi-humorous assault on conformity, the song actually underscores a commonly experienced phenomenon known by those of us trying to slow down and relax and those of us prevented from doing so by one circumstance or another and the phenomenon is this: once we do figure out how to stop the hectic pace, take a breath and find a beach chair we can often find ourselves feeling down or depressed. We can literally leave work, go on vacation in the sun and find ourselves face to face with the “summertime blues.”
Psychologists and psychoanalysts have many and varied reasons and causes they attribute to this phenomenon, sometimes considered a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder, but the book of Ecclesiastes makes more common sense and practical assertions about this experience of living. Written by Solomon, a man of nearly incalculable wealth, multiple wives and pleasures, limitless power and political influence, and depths of wisdom in human experience and affairs edging on the divine, Ecclesiastics is a meditation on the realities and ultimate limits of human life and our earthly existence by a man who had “been there and done that” in every dimension of his living. In it, Solomon makes sobering observations like:
“So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” (Eccl 2:17-18) and “For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.” (Eccl 2:21-22).
Discouraging, huh?
Yes, but it doesn’t have to be. Solomon, in all of his exploration of the ultimate lack of satisfaction found in success, wealth, power and pleasure concludes that even a full life lived without a sense of eternal significance is, tragically, an empty life.
If you’re experiencing the blues this summer, don’t leave that experience where Eddie Cochran seemed to have left it when he wrote, “Sometimes I wonder what I’m a gonna do…”
The summertime blues can lead us to God and His eternal satisfaction, if we’re open to Him, are you?
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