Why Winter Is A Good Thing

It is so cold where I am right now, that metal is snapping, frostbite can happen in a few minutes, cars won’t start, and as a city, we are praying that there won’t be a power outage due to an energy overload.
Winter is demanding we slow it all down.
Which is hard when you are used to being busy, when life is rolling along at a fast clip, bubbling with motion, quick, immediate. The more you can’t run around doing the things you usually do, the more we try and do that very thing.
I see it all the time, the pick-ups trucks or the cars with 4 wheel drive behave like it’s summer, whizzing across lanes of traffic like it’s no big deal until it is, until ice hidden under swirling drifts of snow has different ideas and you and your truck are introduced to the nearest ditch or worse.
I’m not immune to it, in my own way.
-37c feels like -45c?
Hey! My mind says,
“Maybe I should take up winter running!”
Winter running?
What. Are. You. Talking. About?!
But that’s how it goes.
We are contradictory as humans, and I’m a human. Trying winter running in a dangerous cold snap is not the time to start. I know this. Yet, something in me wants to do it anyway.
A girl in one of the many restaurants I’ve worked in over the years once very wisely said.
“The busier it gets, the more I slow down.”
I think of this often, and I try to live that advice when I remember, because something very interesting happens when I do, especially when I physically slow down.
I am calmer. My mind intuitively is clearer. I have more patience. I am more settled.
Decisions are less complicated. Life seems less demanding, more manageable.
I’m a nicer person.
I feel more myself because I am with myself.
If I stop fighting it, winter then becomes a gift. A natural invitation to reflect, to reassemble, to re-connect. To come in out of the cold.