Winter's over
There was a dump of snow last night and this morning. The 10 cms of snow had added on top of two earlier snowstorms that had brought in similar or more amounts. But, while cleaning up the snow, there was this feeling in me that “Winter is over”.
It does not matter that February is the coldest month each year, with the most snow received (in the Toronto suburbs where I live) and there are ways to go before the snowing will stop sometime in March or even April sometimes. But “Winter is over”. I felt it from the angle of the sun. I saw it in the weather prediction patterns that project 5-degree (Celcius) maximums during the daytime (in spite of negative nighttime lows). I feel it from the fact that sunrise has started earlier by 7 AM and sunsets beyond 6 PM. And I can imagine the spring air and the upcoming flowers and greenery.
We, humans, are intuitive beings. We sense from what we observe, hear, smell, touch. We have the ability to convert disparate data and past knowledge/patterns into useful information, by connecting the dots. And we do a lot of it unconsciously without much effort.
“Winter is over” also has a deeper significance for me. There are several “Winter’s” going on simultaneously in my life. One of those other winters’s started a year ago when I left my previous work on a journey to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I felt like an imposter in the work that I did (for the previous 15 years) so this long one-year winter has helped me reinvent myself (yet again in life, and this is not the first time). I am now clear on what I would love to do, and how and what I would do. And while experimenting on it, I am also equally clear about the things that I shall not do anymore. And that by itself is a great revelation to me. And I writing these posts each day is one of those multiple safe-to-fail parallel experiments that I am now on.
There are other “Winter’s” in my life that are beyond my control. Both in me and in people around me whom I love dearly and the only thing I can do is to look forward with “hope” that things will change for the better.
And at a macro level, the COVID pandemic “Winter” that we are in, is also coming to an end. You can see the “thaw” - the slow fall in infection rates and deaths, the slow increase in vaccination rates in Israel, UK, the USA, and other countries. And the hope that my family and I might get a vaccine in the next few months here in Canada. This “Winter” too is coming to a potential slow end.
“Winter’s over” and I feel it.