Winter

Winter

I live in Michigan and we are smack dab in the middle of a pretty cold and snowy winter. As I drove home the other day, and sat in traffic, frustrated, bored and anxious to get home, I became aware of my thoughts and, frankly, I wasn't happy with what i found. I was cursing winter, the whole of it; the snow, the cold, the sloppy wet floors and dogs and salt and ruined shoes and more salt and accidents, spinouts, black ice, and more cold. And then I stopped.

As a child I loved winter--all of it. You could say I lived it because I never once sought to remove myself from the experience. I never got cold, felt sorry for myself, dreaded the snow buried in my boots that rubbed holes in the skin on my ankles. Never wished I was someplace else. All of the things that made winter winter I was ok with. So as I sat there in my car with my thoughts in a holding pattern, I asked, what had changed. Did winter change or did I change? The answer was simple and very obvious, I did.

Winter just is, it's like content that we're exposed to every minute of every day. But the context in which I perceived the winter had changed dramatically. What was once joy now lies buried beneath acres of baggage that I've systematically added; like the chains of Jacob Marley, I forged layer upon layer, year after year, further obscuring the reality of what winter really is. I've placed terabytes of information on top of simple and peaceful in order to make it fit into my current worldview. The current view held by myself was so far removed from the winter I knew as a child that I couldn't even recognize it for what it was. But then I realized it was more than just some vain attempt at trying to regain a lost childhood perception. I had altered my own perception of reality by imposing associations, identifications and all sorts of other brain related functions onto something that was entirely not that at all. Winter just is. I added all the rest.

For the longest time I couldn't find the feelings I once held that told me winter was something more than a massive inconvenience. Every time I got close to re-experiencing those feelings it was time to put my car in gear and move another six inches. After a while, however, I began to relax and slowly let winter back in. But this time I left the baggage behind. I brought it back one aspect at a time by changing the context. I looked at snow without any other thoughts and I saw only snow. Each individual flake was falling in complete perfection. I rolled my window down and felt cold without thinking it was bitter, or frigid or any one of a hundred adjectives. Without my past experience or a ‘pang’ of dread from a potentially unhappy future event, it was just cold. For the first time in years I experienced only cold. Only then did winter slowly begin to come back. And all the while I drove home I held winter in its proper place. Free from all the extraneousness so to behold only that which it really is. Winter.