Counting down the days until summer means wishing away a hundred days you’ll never get back.

A countdown quietly reclassifies everything before the date as an obstacle. Those hundred days still happen, still hold your friends and the things you are good at, and you spend them treating the whole stretch as a queue to be endured. Looking forward to something is fine and part of the pleasure of it. Converting the wait into dead time is the expensive part.

Keep the anticipation and drop the tally. If there is a counter on your wall or your phone, take it down for a week. Then find one thing inside the current hundred days that is worth showing up for.