Five Days of Snow: Life Lessons

Snow has come a calling to many areas on the planet. It has stretched its icy biceps over the land providing a winter blanket over our lives. For many, the coldness of its embrace has stopped us dead in our tracks and impacted our lives in ways that we will regurgitate both professionally and personally during the big thaw in the spring.

The snow can be measured in depth of coverage and quantified in a financial and emotional emptiness of promises that for this year will remain unfulfilled. There is purity in the blanket of whiteness that bares open our souls and our emotions. Its strength is measured in its impact on our lives. The last five days of snow in 2009 will carry different memories for each of us.

For me, the snow has come at the best time in my life. It has provided me with a blanket of reflection where I can stop and roll the compactness of its ice crystals into thoughts measured only in the depth of the thoughts. The snow has given me pause to stop during my life's journey and redirect my tracks in new directions as I reflect on the meaning of current engagements and ready myself for next year's disengagements in creating new life and new snow tracks.

The snow has inherent power in its ability to shut down the technology that provides us with the basic comforts of life. Years past, the snow and the wind have done just that; shut off the power of our thoughts and forced us to reckon with a life lived in past history where there was no electricity, power, or means to exist except in what we created in our collective connections of humanity.

Five days of snow in years past covered the world in darkness and numbed our minds in survival as its bitter cold left no skin untouched or mental faculty unencumbered. Snow then left its message and its memory. Snow now has also left its message with a different memory of heat, basic life necessities for most, but not for all. For some, the snow is a life stealer and a slow numbing of memories and experiences that have left some with a closer embrace with the elements. At various points in my life, I too was one with the elements of snow and its direct meaning in my survival to exist.

For me yet again, the snow and its impact have provided a pause to value life and treasure the journey. It has given me time to reflect and have a profound respect of my place in the Universe and understand that in my humanity, I am no match for elements and temperatures that are unsustainable for life. I can walk in the snow, throw a snowball, make a snow person, and feel its coldness on an exposed cheek, but I can't sit down in the middle of a snowfall for the day and live.

Five days of snow, yes five days of white powder blanketing the land has given all of humanity a chance to reflect and rethink our existence on the planet. As we begin to unthaw and think about what really matters in life, think about the snow. Maybe next year, we won't need a blanket to redirect us into matters of the heart; maybe all we'll need next year is a shawl of rain and snow flurries as reminders that five days of snow can become ten, twenty, a lifetime of reflection and redirection of actions that must be purposeful in sustaining life as we know it.