I woke up this morning to a foot of fresh, new powerdery snow, a veritable winter wonderland! While snow days bring out the curmudgeon in some, I find overall that, like mass power outages and ice storms, snow days bring us together in fresh new ways. We talk to our neighbours while shoveling, pitch in where our help might be needed, throw up our hands and laugh at the insanity of wedging garbage bins on top of mounds of the white stuff.
There are squeals of delight all down the street as school children sloosh along sidewalks, chasing friends with a mitt full of fluffy crystals. This sudden shift is a gift given to us by nature. What I’m interested in here is the joyful, child-like wonder we often feel when waking up to trees laden down like those in picturesque Christmas cards. But there is something else, and that is what is dropped.
For a day, or two, we realize that nothing is going to be perfect. Nothing is going to run quite right. We will likely be late for work, and others, in a similar position, will understand. Or, we call in a ‘once in a while’ home day. For a time, we let ourselves and others off the hook of needing to strive for perfection. Even high-performant newscasters break a smile at the flakes fly in their face while reading the weather, or at scenes on the live-feed of drivers trying to shovel themselves out of lane ways. We drop our shoulders, and maybe take a luxurious hot bath in the evening after the shovelling is done, and drop into a more fluid, state of accepting what is. After all, there’s nothing to be done!
