Surviving vs. Thriving

Winter is upon us. Again. It has been for a couple of months now. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's old. Over. Stale. It's the extra three loaves of bread, two and half gallons of milk, and two eighteen packs of eggs we bought to survive a Nor'easter at the end of December. In a word: unappealing.

From Wandering & Wondering

Most of us are sick of the snow and the cold and the shoveling. Dear god the shoveling! The random sixty degree days are little comfort: they melt the snow and ice, but it just refreezes once the sun has set.

The world turns into a solid sheet of black ice.

There are a few people, a crazy minority, who enjoy the weather. They relish the crisp air. They revel in the bright layers of fleece and wool and down. They wake up early on the weekends looking forward to going out into the cold!

While these people are probably insane, they thrive in this bitterly cold, gray season. They have something the rest of us - the sane people who know in our bones that this weather is for penguins and polar bears - do not: a different perspective.

They don't see snow as something that must be completely removed and eradicated. Instead, they see it as a toy. It's something to be played with. Played in. While we find snow and ice ridden driveways frozen wastelands of arduous chores, they find them full of snowman materials or see them as makeshift skate rinks.

The reason these people thrive in this weather is that they see possibility where the rest of us see cold, wet damnation. Rather that dreading the oncoming storm, they look forward to it. It'll provide fresh powder. It will give them seemingly infinite snowball materials. It will refresh the tubing parks. The cold temperatures provide sturdy ice on which to skate. And, at the end of the day, they come inside to get warm and drink hot cocoa with marshmallows (spiked with peppermint schnapps).

When the Nuclear Winter happens, these people will do more than survive. They will do more than make the best of a bad situation. They'll turn a bad situation into a good one.

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