We’ve got hot summer nights on the horizon. Come on, it’s an election year. In thinking about the days ahead of heated debates, accusations and counter accusations, I made some resolutions I’d like to share:

• I resolve not to get too caught up in politics. No, seriously. I’m not going to count the days — 138, but who’s counting? — before the election.

• I resolve not to study a single political poll between now and Nov. 8, which is, as I mentioned but we’re not going to talk about, 138 days away.

• I resolve I will not watch too many debates when I have better things to do. I might need to clip my toenails. Or, maybe, a movie I’ve seen 20 times, like “Bull Durham” will be on TV and I’ll just have to watch that scene one more time when the players come to the mound to discuss wedding gifts and cursed gloves.

• I resolve not to focus on the number of times either candidate calls the other one a liar. If they do, however, I resolve to imagine that candidate adding, “liar, liar, pants on fire,” to add some levity to the accusation.

• I resolve not to worry too much that one of these two people whom I don’t particularly like will be president. Seriously, we’ve got all these people eager for power and these two are the best we can find? Not everyone wants to be president, but doesn’t this seem like the perfect time for a dark horse to throw his or her hat in the ring?

• I resolve to avoid listening to pundits. I don’t want to hear how you absolutely think your candidate won the debate and the other candidate completely lost the debate, the election and his or her mind the other night. Can you imagine two pundits watching everything you did in a day?

Pundit 1: “Oh, he totally nailed that plaque on his teeth. He won’t need to brush his teeth for a week after a performance like that.”

Pundit 2: “Are you kidding? Do you think he gave the molars any attention? I’ve spoken to the molars and they are feeling neglected. I have a way to brush that would fight for every tooth and not just the ones on top.”

My only pundit exception is David Gergen: He’s smart and funny, has a deep authoritative voice and he’s really tall, so it looks like he’s observing everything from on high. Besides, in the early 1990s I met him, not to name drop or anything, and he actually listened carefully to a question I asked.

• I resolve to do 10 push-ups every time I hear one of the candidates, in an advertisement or during a TV or radio news program, use the word “fight.” I figure if they argue that they’ll fight for me, I might as well fight for my own fitness. Maybe I’ll do 20 sit-ups every time I watch them shake their heads in frustration when describing the ridiculous and calamitous choice on the other side of the aisle.

• I resolve to think of the two candidates as the leaders of their packs on a middle school playground. Each time one of them is emotionally wounded and levels accusations against the other, I will imagine that they are just going through a difficult phase in their political career and that they’ll be OK once they get to high school.

• Finally, no matter what, I resolve to remind myself that the Constitution guarantees us checks and balances. That means, regardless of the final “winner,” other leaders can protect all our interests.

I am you and you are me. We, the people of this country and this planet, share something people hundreds of years before and hundreds of years hence can’t possibly have in common with us: now.

What defines “now”? Labels. We are tremendously caught up in them. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? And then, something happens, something unimaginable in Florida, and it’s clear at least one person directed his hatred toward one particular group.

This was an attack on the gay community. Other labels will undoubtedly stick and motives will undoubtedly be uncovered, but it was an attack on gay America. Sure, it was terrorism, because it was terrible and it was shockingly violent, but it was, first and foremost, an attack on a community.

There’s a moving scene at the end of the Kevin Kline film, “In & Out,” at a high school graduation in which everyone stands up and says they are gay in support of Kline, who is on the verge of losing his job because of his sexual orientation.

As we watched a moving Tony Awards ceremony, I hoped someone would step to the microphone and say, “I’m gay and anyone else who is gay today, please stand with me.” I’m sure the entire audience would have stood up.

For today, tomorrow and for the foreseeable future, we are all gay. We are all lesbian, bisexuals and transgender. We are like the Danish people who, legend has it, put yellow stars on their clothing to make it impossible to distinguish Jewish Danes from fellow Danes during World War II. There is some debate about whether Christian X, the king of Denmark, put the Jewish star on his clothing. What is clear, however, is that the Danes did what they could in a horrible time to save their citizens from discrimination and death by helping them escape to Sweden.

In the here and now, with so much blood, so many tears and such incomprehensible loss, there is something we can do for our fellow Americans: We can be gay. I’m not suggesting we all need same-sex partners, merely, that the label that seems so toxic to some applies to all of us.

We live with such random acts of terror and violence. Far too often, the president of the United States has become the Mourner in Chief. Maybe, instead, he should be gay, too.

Let’s not wait for a reluctant and divided Congress to act and to take action on guns, or on hate, or on love. Let’s embrace and understand each other.

There will be plenty of people pointing fingers. The FBI was watching this killer through different points in his life. Did they miss anything? I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who will suggest that if the clubgoers had had guns, this killer wouldn’t have been as effective because someone would have been able to take him out before he did all that damage. Is that really what we want, a bunch of people in a club with guns? Would that really make us safer? It’s a bit like the mutually assured destruction argument during the Cold War. Maybe it was so irrational to consider destroying the world that no one pushed the button, but we still have all those weapons and there is still plenty of hate and fear. We and the former Soviet Union spent billions on weapons when those resources might have cured cancer, improved food crops or developed cheaper, cleaner energy.

So, how do we stop the hate? We stand up, we unite, we share — and we recognize that I am you and you are me.

We all have addictions. I don’t mean we’re all addicted to a narcotic, to alcohol or to something that can cause harm to us, to our families or to our communities.

We think of addictions as negatives, because they suggest a dependency or a need for something without which we find ourselves unbalanced, uncomfortable or unhinged.

There are plenty of positive addictions. Many of us are, for better or worse, addicted to our children. We want them to succeed, to be happy, to live better lives than we’ve had and to have every opportunity to find their niche.

When they’re born, we become addicted to the sound of their giggling and laughter, which helps us get through those sleepless nights just as effectively as a caffeinated beverage. That sound is more pleasant than the most magnificent music we’ve ever heard, than the calls of birds outside our windows in the morning, or than the school bell that signaled the end of another week and the start of a much-anticipated weekend.

Outside of the home, we can become addicted to victory, whether it’s at work, on a softball field where we are competing against a group of people from another company, or at a traffic light where we want to beat the car next to us to the on-ramp for the Long Island Expressway.

Our bodies become accustomed to these addictions. Runners receive chemical endorphins in the brain that give them a high, allowing them to run much longer than someone whose would-be endorphins are knocked unconscious by alcohol or are far too overwhelmed from sugar overload to become active. When you’re driving in extreme heat or cold and you see runners pushing themselves up a steep hill, they are feeding that addiction.

Speaking of feeding, we are addicted to particular foods, or food groups. If we eat cookies every night, our bodies send signals to our brains to find those chocolate chip cookies. We can also become addicted to foods that are healthy for us, like broccoli, blueberries or gluten-free kale pizza.

We can also become addicted to long days of summer sun. When the fall and winter come, we might miss the light, craving it the way we would another cup of mid-afternoon coffee when we’re feeling run down through the day.

But is addiction really the right word? Aren’t these habits and not addictions? I see addictions and habits as a spectrum, somewhat akin to the discussion about what is normal. We all tend to believe we’re normal, but as we know from our own families and from the families we marry into, the range of normal is broad. Every family has its crazy uncles, its eccentric aunts and its oddball distant cousins. Much as we might like to believe the grass is greener with other families, we know that the more we interact with extended family groups, the more likely we are to observe behaviors that fall outside the range of what we consider normal.

So, if we recognize our addictions, can we change them?

Like any addiction, change is challenging. Plenty of support groups offer help, especially with addictions to alcohol, drugs or other substances. There are also groups like Jenny Craig, which offer to provide balanced meals that help people transition to a different diet.

Even without support groups, though, people can fundamentally change some of their addictions, often when they are so concerned with the happiness of someone else — a spouse, a child, a niece or a parent — that their own needs no longer come first.

All the world’s a stage.

I read those words long ago, but didn’t appreciate the stage itself until recently. As a child, I struggled to wade through school books rife with flowing descriptions. Who cares what kinds of trees are outside the house, if there is a swing set near someone’s first kiss or if a fog sits heavy on a town?

When I was my son’s age, I found those details as relevant as the cars that drove by me on my walk to junior high school. Action and dialogue meant so much more. I wanted to hear what people said or know what they were thinking.

I now appreciate the stage more than ever. In fact, I’d like to go back to Ward Melville High School and thank the stage crew for building sets that turned the stage into the Upper West Side in the 1950s or a yellow brick road.

My appreciation for a setting, however, extends beyond the actual stage. It’s in the seats of an auditorium, where a shared armrest becomes the location for the first tentative effort to hold hands.

The setting continues through the wooden doors that, like eyes focusing from a distance, have opened simultaneously, allowing an appreciative audience its first glimpse of the land that awaits. It’s a part of the marble hallway, where the chatter of birds on nearby trees supplants the chitchat of children, who seem to race out through a revolving glass door that allows the nearby rays of the sun to pour inside.

We can shift our attention to blades of grass on the playground, where an undersized third-grade transfer student catches a fly ball for the first time and suddenly feels as if everything will be OK in his new town. That same blade of grass can provide cover for an earthworm as it looks to go back underground after a heavy rainstorm, lest the birds circling overhead stop to bring the worm back to a nest of hungry birds waiting at the top of an awning on a boarded-up house the children believe is haunted.

A setting can become altered the way a police siren appears to change from the Doppler effect. Even though the alarm wails at the same frequency, its pitch seems different as the sound approaches. The basketball net that appeared to be impossibly high when we were in first grade is remarkably close to our hands as we age, making us feel as if we’ve become Gulliver in our own lives.

Nostalgia can imbue a setting with emotion. I recently drove down my old block. I saw a version of me that was younger than my children are now. I could see myself staring out the side window of my room across a row of evergreens, letting my eyes become blurry to soften the colors of the red, green, purple, yellow and white Christmas lights down the block. If we were lucky some evenings, the snow would cause the lights to flicker.

Down below those tall evergreens and just outside my front window were several bushes. During the fall, with a full moon and a violent wind, the needles on those bushes transformed into a man with a mohawk hairstyle swaying back and forth.

One morning, those bushes disappeared. I tentatively pulled back the shade, where a dump truck of snow buried my menacing friend. The bushes bent over double, as if the man with the mohawk had taken a hard punch to the gut.

As I squinted at the scene, I knew that I had aged but the man with the mohawk hadn’t.

Yes, each setting is alive with possibilities.