Long Winter

Following up on the near-title of my last post and it's awful alliteration, it is snowing here again today. I was thinking of the snow previously because of a past memory. When I was seven or eight years-old, I wanted to go outside and play in the snow at night. Our backyard was safe and secure, so my mother let me get bundled up and out I went.

My memory of that night is clear. Our normally busy street was silenced by the day's snowfall. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. I walked around the yard by the light of the porch. Suddenly I noticed the light from a different angle against the snow, and I looked closer. I could see the individual shapes of the snowflakes. I was amazed. I had always thought that the paper cut-outs we made in school were a human representation of snow, like the trace of my hand could be a turkey and a bunch of triangles stacked were a Christmas tree. I was thrilled to see those flakes and yes, the rumor was also right: no two were the same!

I looked up at the light over our door, and all of a sudden I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. The silence, the cold, the beauty that was around me but small enough to bypass all came forward in a moment of clarity. I remember it making me feel uncomfortable, and I soon went back inside the house. The enormity of it was incomprehensible to me then, but powerful enough to remain in memory, clear as the sky.

Last week it was my birthday, and like many of the birthdays I celebrated in the past, it snowed. The weather was supposed to be ugly and tough to deal with. I have been told by several sources that the only reason I like snow is that I don't have to shovel it. There could be truth to that, but I like to believe it's because I appreciate the beauty of it and don't like to see it as a nuisance.

I left the house early on my birthday and stood for a moment on our front porch, which is eerily like the one wrapped around my parent's house all those years ago. The snow fell, and it sparkled. Just like the sparkle of those fallen flakes that retained their shapes. I stood in the silence of our street, again, another busy street silenced, and watched. I could see the shapes again, I could see it sparkle. In the quiet of the morning I realized what a gift I was given. It was a reminder of that peace, that silence. It reminded me that some moments always remain with you, and having those moments is a blessing.

I watched the snow for as long as I could before I had to move on to other things, like work. When I was a kid, I broke the moment because I couldn't handle it, or understand it. Now, as an adult, I had adult things to attend to, so the moment was gone. But the feeling remained all day. I felt fortunate to know that sometimes you miss the beauty that is all around you, but it is still there if you want to come back to it.

I was going to call this post A Small Slice of Serenity in the Snow, but going crazy with the alliteration is annoying enough to make even the most bored of souls turn away and read something else. And the "serenity" has now been ruined by advertising by forcing the association with incontinence products.

Another thing I want to avoid in this blog is a concept I have to take from George Carlin. A few years back an email was making the forwarding circuit that basically waxed reminiscent of the old days, your long-gone youth, how your hair used to be nice, but now it's not, etc. You got the email. Unfortunately, it cited the author as George Carlin, and this was untrue. On his website, Mr. Carlin corrected the world that he did not write, what he called, that "sappy piece of shit." Now, when I write about important issues that just may have a note or two of longing, nostalgia or anything of the like, I put it through the "sappy piece of shit" meter. Thank you, George Carlin. You are missed for many, many reasons.

Writing about what is important to you and personally revealing is not easy for a number of reasons. Placing your feelings out in the world, even one as seemingly impersonal and anonymous as cyber space, is never easy. What I find most difficult is just the language itself. Trying to avoid the SPOS meter can sometimes be difficult. But I am going to do my best, so here it goes.

In late 2006 I sat one bleak Saturday afternoon alone in the apartment I shared with my husband. I looked out at a gray landscape of buildings before the famous skyline of a big city. I'm so unhappy, I thought. If I don't do something about this now, I'll be like this for the rest of my life.

The rest of my life part bugged me even more than the unhappy part. I was starting to realize that your life is made up of a series of habits and collectively these habits make your expereinces what they are. I suffered from awful anxiety, the kind that manifests itself physically. I would come home from work feeling like someone was placing a big hand against my chest and pushing. I was dealing with this by drinking a lot of alchohol, which in turn made the anxiety even worse. I didn't want to get help because I thought that I could solve all my problems myself. After all, wasn't it weak not to be able to? But I realized that the weakness was in not asking anyone for a hand out of the mess my mind and body were becoming. Anger, anxiety, resentment, hoplessness and profound sadness were all becoming daily emotions that were taking their toll on me. There had to be a way out of it.

That day in 2006 was the real beginning for me of a major shift that brought a sense of purpose and peace to my life. What I hope to accomplish in this blog is a chronicle of that tranformation then and now, as it is still happening.