I live roughly in the angle formed by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in Western New York. But, okay, when I really want sympathy, I tell people that I live near Buffalo, city of infamy, when it comes to winter.
But today it's almost 65 degrees outside, a new record. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the scent of newly exposed wet ground is in the air. It feels, for all the world, like spring. (Sigh.) I would that it were so, but it's a cruel trick. Tomorrow is forecasted to be 20 degrees and snowy.
Part of me wants to go out in this glorious weather and enjoy it to the fullest. The other part of me doesn't care to be tempted into happiness by that which is merely fleeting. Maybe that's my nature, always looking ahead, preparing for what's yet to come.
I am reminded of the times when my military husband was deployed and he would find a way to return home for a weekend. Deliriously happy at the sight of him, I would nonetheless begin immediately to fight the melancholy knowledge that he would be gone again in a matter of hours. At times, parting after so brief a visit was painful enough to make me wish he hadn't come at all. Better to be consistently lonely than to have this roller coaster of joy and sadness, or so my thinking went.
In time, I learned that if I were to enjoy his visits I had to force myself to live in the moment--each and every moment, the here and now, without thinking too far ahead. It's a good lesson for someone like me: a plotter, a planner. I need to be reminded that tomorrow is never assured, but today is here, right before me, here to be savored.
Time to go sit in the sun.
2 comments:
Cool post, Mary! I'm also way too forwarding-thinking for my own good. While not a 100% bad trait, it can definitely be paralyzing.
Get out in that sun!
It went into the 50s here over night! It's crazy. It's foggy here though but earlier as the sun rose the whole sky was pink and so the fog turned pink. It was wild!
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