When Charles Tobias wrote the words to "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer," he surely was inspired by the kind of mornings we've had lately in Orangeburg.

Each day, the morning haze beads up on my windshield, shields the morning sun's golden brilliance so that it looks more like a golf ball in flight across a long, long fairway and makes me drive a little more slowly and carefully as I head out to work.

As the morning passes and the haze begins to diffuse, the world gets clearer and brighter — the sun now a fully seen force of heat and light, the grass greener, the trees once again tall and stately in complete view instead of partially hidden by the morning mists. Life picks up its speed again, and we move on.

Haze: noun. 1. atmospheric moisture or dust or smoke that causes reduced visibility. 2. confusion characterized by lack of clarity (WordNet 2.0, PrincetonUniversity).

It's interesting how those two definitions blend together. For just as the morning's haze confuses our direction due to poor visibility, life's haze can also confuse our direction by a lack of clarity.

When the morning's haze densely covers the earth, it can become quite difficult to travel the roads we drive each day. The familiarity of each twist and turn of the road becomes clouded, and we can lose our sense of where we are.

So we slow down. We look more carefully. I even roll down my windows to listen for oncoming cars when the visibility is so thick I can't see past the grill of my car.

We cannot see clearly, so we proceed with caution and an increased awareness that we are vulnerable.

So, too, in life, we sometimes exist in a state of haze. Perhaps an event has triggered a time of confusion or uncertainty, and we experience a loss of direction, seeming to wander through each day as in a cloud. People speak to us, but we do not hear. We do our jobs but don't remember what we've done. We make decisions but not consciously; months later, we can't recall making them.

We pay the bills, we tend the home, we live with our families; yet, in some sense, we are not there.

And like the summer's haze, our days of haze can bead up on life's windshield, our vision; they can shield the brilliance of life so that it seems to move in slow motion, and they can cause us to proceed through our days a little more cautiously, aware the paths we have always traveled seem a little less clear, a little more daunting. Throughout those days, we experience a stronger sense of vulnerability.

But just as the haze of the dawning days lifts away to a restored beauty and fullness of vision, so, too, does our own haze. Though we may seem lost in it, wandering through its pervading heaviness for days, weeks or months on end, it also eventually lifts away to a restored sense of purpose and clarity. The world seems beautiful again. We are more than present in our daily lives, aware of our choices, our decisions, our families, our friends and our work.

The earth's atmosphere creates the conditions that cause morning haze. So, too, it must be with our lives. Life's atmosphere creates conditions that cause life haze; our lives change for a time, but perhaps we can deal with those times better when we know that one day, like the morning haze, those times are going to lift away. We will move on.

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