(An Off-Season Thought)
I hate snow, and the older I get the more I hate it. After a snowstorm – and after our neighbors’ kids shovel me out – I’ll immediately go for a ride around the neighborhood just to prove to myself that it wasn’t so bad, and then while I still hate it, I’ll hate it less.
Now far be it from me, a non-superstitious rationalist to have any superstitions (poo, poo), but there are two related to snow that I simply can’t shake…and they seem to work: you know those thin snow poles one puts around a driveway and along the street line? Well, I take mine down sometime in May. I’m sure the neighbors just love me. And for the cherry on the cake, we keep a large shovel on the porch until the day I remove the snow poles. They serve as did the blood on the lintel of our ancestors’ homes in the Passover story…to keep the angel of snowdeath away! Funny thing…they work in May but not so much from mid-December through the beginning of April. I can’t imagine why.
Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer, once said, “The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.” How true that is of life in general. When faced with tzuris, something troubling we all face now and again, we believe it will never leave us, that we’re stuck. Of course, there are illnesses and accidents that don’t fit his point, but in general life offers us temporary bad times that will go away, maybe not tomorrow but sooner than we think. While we believe the dark cloud hovers over us day after day, as Annie sang, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”
I’m not trying to minimize our problems by any means; we all have them and often they can be extremely troubling. I am, however, trying to maximize the fact that the vast majority of our days, our lives, have a bright side. So much depends on our perspective. We just can’t keep the snow poles and shovel in our view until springtime; even I know that kind of magical thinking is absurd. We can and must in fact, “drive around our neighborhood” and do what we can to overcome the tzuris we’re facing at the moment. We might need help to shovel it away but then so often it’s up to us. Again, not to file problems in Fantasyland, but indeed, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”!
(To be visited again tomorrow)