bits and bants vol. 3
thoughts on winter-- because what else do I have??
It’s January. I just saw the sun for the first time in 12 days. Let’s talk about winter.
Because I live somewhere where the snow doesn’t melt from the months of November to March (if I’m very lucky), I know a thing or two about winter. If I were a more whole and healthy person I would learn more and more from winter each year of my life, yet cruelly, having lived in Canada all my winters, the winters seem to get harder each year.
It’s not simply the cold. And the cold is terribly annoying. It requires layers, five minutes of preparation to even go outside, and then not many moments of enjoyment outdoors until you start to lose feeling in your digits. But what seems hardest is the idea and knowledge that this season of much grey, tons of white, and just sameness goes on for what feels like forever.
This week I was pondering the sameness. I love routine. I strongly dislike change. Yet even I in the third week of January (is it the fourth week of January?), feel as if all the days are the same and that these same days will continue until the end of time.
It’s extremely hard in our post-modern, hyper connected culture to not always be wanting to go on to the next great thing. Our social media and how we interact with each other is almost completely based on sharing the next cool thing we’re doing; it’s not just what we’re doing, it’s our content. Our brand. Who we are. We need to constantly be experiencing. I would go so far to say it is the strongest millennial yearning. We define ourselves by the enjoyment we’re experiencing, we change our careers when they get boring, we keep trying to fill the bottomless hole of experience.
But winter, and let’s be real, ordinary time, offers us no dramatic event or experience. It offers us simply our lives. As we’re living them, day in and day out. And the time to either give in to our inner distractions that tell us to reject the time given to us by wishing time away and envying the experiences of others, or to look deeper at what God is calling us to in the present moment, to find the personal meaning and importance of today.
I hope I don’t need to say that this is all precisely what I’ve been struggling with all week. So, no expert at loving all the boring parts of life over here, still learning! And also, fun is a good thing! We all need more fun in our lives, but that more often than not means the real life kind of fun that you can actually schedule into your life. And schedule it we must if we’re moms. It’s important! Fun is necessary! And an entirely different post for another day.
The best thing I listened to this week was this incredible lecture from The Thomistic Institute called Acedia: How Our Sorrows Determine the State of Our Souls by Prof. Thomas Hibbs. I am going to listen to it again because there is so much in it that I think I need to think and pray about more.
Reading, Watching, What Have You
We’ve been watching Welcome to Wrexham, the soccer documentary about Ryan Reynolds buying a soccer team. It actually is quite a good show about showing the real British soccer fans and what the sport and club mean to their community. I can be incredibly cynical about sports because I watch a lot of them, but we also have to remind ourselves that they actually are important to real, regular people.
Reading A Twist of the Knife by Anthony Horowitz. I needed a break from the literary fiction I’m trying to catch up on and thought I’d give Horowitz another go. I found Magpie Murders a good idea, but way too verbose. This novel feels much better organized and very easy to read.
I think that’s it from me today, I’m off to finish school for the week, then have loads of errands to run, then off to spend approximately one million dollars at Costco because it appears we have no food in this house. Regular life, man.
- Christy