Focusing on the Bright Spots in a Long, Cold Season

In a game of mind versus matter, let your mind win

Photo by Izzy Park on Unsplash

Note: I wrote this essay a few weeks ago for another online platform where I also publish when we had another icky, icy round of snow and very cold temperatures that hung around for a while. Although we’ve just had a dusting of snow over the last day and it looks to be close to seventy by the beginning of next week, I thought I would post this essay here anyway, offering, I hope, strategies for dealing with any unwelcome or tiresome circumstances.

I don’t know about you, but where I live, winter just won’t quit.

We get through a pile of snow followed by some freezing rain that lays a nice layer of ice over everything, and then we have a few days where things thaw out a bit, only to have another round of snow followed, this time, by subarctic temperatures that last not two or three days but stretch out to five, six days. “Oh, God!” we are all thinking. “When will this end?”

Well, I don’t have an answer for that. But in the effort to cheer myself up and muster the determination and spirit to endure, I thought I would try to come up with something nice about winter, something to help me redirect my energy and despise it less. Here goes.

1. Cozy fires in the living room. No, cozy fires will not cheer me up because even though I remembered to open the flue, enough smoke billowed into the room to leave furniture, rugs, and other upholstery reeking for weeks. I won’t be doing that again.

2. Snow. Yes, it’s pretty. And it’s hard to beat that beautiful, lush quiet that follows a nice blanketing. And who doesn’t love to make a snow man? Or a snow angel? Like jumping jacks, only on the ground — how easy and fun is that? But snow creates hazardous driving conditions. After sliding through two intersections on my way to the grocery, I have had enough snow, thanks.

3. Cold water. What I mean by this is that you don’t need to run the water for very long to get a refreshingly chilled glass of it out of the faucet because the pipes are so cold — assuming they are not frozen. But this also means that you have to run the hot water for at least ten minutes to get anything approaching tepid. So, no, again.

4. Expansive views. The lack of leafy green tree foliage is initially exhilarating. You can see so much and so far! But then after a couple of months, things are looking so twiggy, brown, and withered it seems they will never revive. It’s a downer. This doesn’t make the list either.

5. Hot chocolate, sweet and frothy, or dotted with pillowy white marshmallows. Nope, because you can enjoy it any time of year. It’s not unique to winter.

6. Increased metabolism. You burn more calories trying to stay warm in cold weather. But burning more calories may trigger a bigger appetite. A bigger appetite means eating more calories, perhaps more than you need, especially likely given all food-centered the holiday hoopla, from Thanksgiving through to the Super Bowl. Not a winner.

7. Flannels and fleece, trapper hats and toboggans. At first it’s fun to bundle up in all this fuzzy, furry stuff. But then after about six weeks, it becomes SO. MUCH. WORK. So many layers. And so many bits to lose or misplace — gloves, mittens, scarves, socks. Striking out again.

8. Fewer insects. Not really — fewer insects outside, perhaps, but inside? Just as many as before, maybe even more — crickets hopping about in the basement, spiders webbing window sills, ants industriously shuttling crumbs across the kitchen counter, silverfish slithering around the bathtub drain. Ick.

9. The stillness of the air and a sense of time slowing. That’s really the whole problem, isn’t? The seasons have just come to a standstill. Winter feels as if it will last forever, and that is so exasperating. Existential, even. I don’t need such monumental reminders my insignificance.

10. Lack of moisture in the air. This means that the mirror above the sink doesn’t fog up after I take a shower. No more wiping and streaking the glass! A plus, for sure. However, this also means that my skin is drier, and itchier, and that if I leave things such as lettuce or apple slices out of the refrigerator they become limp and leathery within the hour.

Okay, I am going to stop here, because I have noticed a pattern that I think will keep repeating itself — for every positive thing about winter, I can counter it with something negative. Good, bad. Good, bad. On and on.

But I also see an opportunity in this pattern, a chance for a new mindset. Sure, I can negate every upside of winter with a downside. But I can also choose just to focus on what I enjoy about winter and not what challenges me about the season.

Because winter is going to do whatever it wants to do, whenever it wants to do — even into spring, for all I know! What is the point of wasting energy over something that I can’t control? None, as best I can tell — it’s best, in fact, to light another fire and make another mug of hot chocolate and see if I can find that mitten I left out in the snow the other day making snow angels.

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