So, winter has finally arrived. Being a keen observer of the world I know this is true for two reasons. One, Army beat Navy in football this past weekend. And two, I had to scrape two inches of snow off my car last night before heading home. Not trying to brag, or make my meteorologist friends look bad, but both are long-running indicators for me that winter is well and truly upon us.
Truth be told, I don’t mind the winter, despite years of admonitions from my elders that the older I got the more I’d dislike the chilly season. I have always preferred to live in areas with all four seasons, as each seems to bring something unique to our life experiences.
For me, winter is sort of the reset button, if you will, or a scenery change in the theater. The game we call human existence moves on to the next level, but first the screen and scenery needs to reset. I assume that happens somewhere beneath that curtain of white out there covering the ground.
Yet there is one undeniable benefit that only winter can bring, and it’s something we utterly lose as we become adults … the snow day. Nothing short of Christmas Eve itself holds so much promise for a young child as late night snow flurries and the possibility of an unscheduled—and thus unregulated—day off from school. Those of you from northern climes can certainly remember the feeling, right? You almost couldn’t sleep, the promise of something special in the morning was almost too much excitement for a young body to handle, and the mind reeled with the possibilities!
That the reality the next morning generally fell far short of those late-night expectations never seemed to diminish the next go-around, the next time those gorgeous white flakes dotted the night sky. It was just as magical, and kids experienced just as much hope—triggering just as much imagination—every single time. And in our young minds then, the road clearing crews were evil henchmen, hell-bent upon cutting through the magic and finding a way to make school possible.
How different our take on the world today? How different our view of those same clearing crews, without whose tireless efforts we might be late to work? Now, as adults, we curse the late night flurries already dreading the need to shovel driveways in the morning, or depart for work early to mitigate worse than usual traffic. We no longer see magic in those same flurries, that same accumulation of frozen precipitation. We now only see it as an obstacle to other things.
As a kid, every snow drift begged me to be crossed. Every pile left behind by the snow plows called to be fortified. Seductive sirens sang to me from every white-clad hill “grab a sled and enjoy the ride”. What a remarkably simple way to excite a child’s mind and feed a natural sense of wonder at the world around us. It was magical!
While there are many things I’d change about adulting if I could wave a magic wand, winter reminds me that sometimes it’s the simplest of things that we’ve lost through aging that might matter most. That childlike wonder at snow gently falling from the sky is something, it seems, we can never get back. Having spent hundreds of hours out in the snow building parapets to defend against imagined foes, I can say that I’ve never been happier doing so much work. Yet ten minutes spent scraping snow last night left me fuming.
How far have I fallen from my childhood self? How far have I “progressed” when I see the same substance as a blessing in an earlier decade and a curse in a later one? Maybe my mind—and more importantly, my attitude—aren’t really progressing at all. Maybe—just maybe—I could use a little more of my childhood self’s enthusiasm for life’s possibilities and wonder at the magical world around us.
Maybe.
M. G. Haynes