If you get the chance, be sure to watch the snow falling on a mid-March evening. It may be unexpected, and it may be delaying the spring you’ve been anticipating. You should still make sure that you look out the window as the sun you haven’t seen all day sets. Be sure to notice how you can make out the pink even when you can’t make out the sun.
Be sure to look out at the still-falling snow on a mid-March night. As the street lamp and the everywhere-white of the weather makes it far lighter than it should be. Don’t be bitter about the street light, without it you couldn’t see the sight nearly so well.
Be sure to sleep late the next morning and imagine that the snow’s a foot thick. You don’t know what it will be like when you look out the window, so be sure to savor the possibility that nature has impressed you as you huddle under the covers and enjoy the accumulated warmth. Be sure, too, to appreciate that warmth. There’s no telling how hot or cold the floor of the kitchen will be when your still-bare feet hit it in a few minutes.
Be sure to avoid going outside as long as you can. And make sure that while you do so you imagine it being inhospitably cold, like the South Pole. This illusion will make the extremely temperate 34°F feel nearly balmy when you do finally have to go out.
And do be sure to go out. It’s a highly under-rated thing, trudging through a small accumulation of snow and enjoying the winter wonderland that materialized outside your window overnight.
Be sure to take some time to watch melting snow fall off a chain-link fence. It may sound about as exciting as paint drying, but it’s abstract art at it’s finest. Without purpose or reason or known creator. Watch the odd patterns that seem to drive the random size and position of the chunks as they fall. Puzzle if there’s a reason for that, or anything else.
Be sure to notice how unremarkable it is to be back inside. Notice how that unremarkableness differentiates a March snowstorm from a January snowstorm.
And finally, be sure to watch through the afternoon as the winter wonderland melts away. How quickly it goes in the March weather. How thorough the illusion was that morning, how absent it was by the evening. Consider what, if anything, this means to your and your life.
One response to “If You Get the Chance…”
i think about this often …
to me, it’s a symbol of how things change but perhaps just when you think they’re going to change they pause. then when you settle into something and consider that maybe you were forsaking the current reality for something new, things then change quickly right where you expected to before they slowed down.