In the Grip of Winter Exhaustion

When I was about 12 and enamored with the idea of love, my mom told me about a book that she had enjoyed which had a love story but so much more. The book was Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman and I still remember the depictions of isolation in winter. That feeling struck me when I read the Little House series by Laura Ingles Wilder, too.

Most of us humans weren’t built for winter endurance – mentally or physically. Oh, we smile about how pretty and sparkly the snow and ice is around Christmas because its new and fresh and we’ve had ages to forget that there will be months of the stuff to slog through. And some people have a passion for skiing, skating, or snowboarding; perhaps sledding and a bit of snowman building that gives them reason to hope for the stuff. Not to mention school-child wishes for snow days.

The majority of us just push through and try not to give in to winter exhaustion. The simplest task – an errand to the store, say – becomes a greater chore and drains more energy than necessary after wrapping up in layers, scraping the car, fighting through all the other drivers who’ve forgotten how to navigate this white stuff, finding one of the few remaining parking spots that hasn’t become a snow mountain, only to find that the items that you need are among the new shipment that is stuck on a truck up some impassable mountain pass or other and due who-knows-when.

Quite a distance from that isolation that I read in those books, but still in our modern way greatly affected by the elements. We control so much in our modern world, but nature rules in these months and we humans find our way through. And we fight to keep our schedule the same regardless of the season or weather, where those earlier folk adjusted their activities to accommodate the calendar.

The objective of this Daily Prompt was to teach, but sometimes the most important aspect of teaching is to get us to stop and think. Why do we do what we do?

This post is written in response to The Daily Prompt: Teaching.