I don’t hate cold weather, but it can be a burden. There’s the extreme cold, that will freeze your nostrils shut just from breathing in the frigid air. Ice crystals can form on bare skin in minutes. A power outage or a busted furnace carries with it the whiff of real danger.
Intense cold is dramatic, but relatively rare where I live. Only a handful of days in a typical year are that cold. It’s the length of the season that’s harder for me. For about four months, December through March, you’ll need a jacket outside. The sun is rarely seen. Blue skies are hidden behind a whitish gray soup of clouds and fog. Snow gets in the way, slows down traffic and causes collisions.
Still, there are things that I enjoy about the cold weather. Frozen northern landscapes have a stark, sublime, beauty. You can hike to the middle of a frozen lake and listen to the silence. Winter has stilled the usual activity: there are no leaves for the wind to rustle, no birds singing, no motorboats. On the rare clear day, the sun dazzles, almost painfully, reflecting off a sheet of white. You confront your frailty and finitude, knowing such weather conditions would be unsurvivable without the aid and comfort of technology and society.
The northern latitudes mean winter days are short and cold. The winter season is accentuated so that it intrudes, even into our technologically heated world. We face the cold removing snow from the driveway. A snowstorm can cause school cancellations.
In the depths of winter, the world freezes, but opposite the short, cold days of winter on the calendar are the long, warm days of summer. When you have to wear a jacket for months on end, you can’t believe the five foot snowbanks will ever melt. Somehow, though, brown, barren trees will be covered in green leaves again. The frigid weather will become hot and humid, the dead forests verdant, almost rainforest-like. Year after year, the cycle continues. Humans have always relied on the natural world for survival, and so the predictable rhythm of the changing seasons is universally imprinted into traditional human cultures. It’s like feeling God’s heartbeat.
But there are some places where the seasons are barely noticeable. The weather in Los Angeles is great. It’s almost never too cold, and almost never too hot, at least on the West side. It may rain twenty or thirty days per year. There is a climate chauvinism there, that belittles those who experience a hint of cold, or regular rain. There is an obvious truth behind this stance, but it seems somehow shallow.
In Los Angeles, they say only tourists go to the beach. It’s an exaggeration of course, but when it’s eighty and sunny everyday, there’s no rush to do it today. The weather will be great tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. Why fight for a parking spot in Santa Monica? When you have good weather all the time, it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe you would rather go shopping today to get out of the sun. If all you know is sunshine, it’s oppressive, monotonous, boring.
In the upper Midwest, summer means something. By mid-May, the trees are clad in their summer coat of green. The months of June, July and August are a jubilant explosion. Bonfires, fishing, swimming, camping, patio dining, barbecues, beer gardens. The deprivation of winter gives way to a real joy in summer.
In the spiritual life, the beatitudes tell us that those who are deprived from earthly goods have the inside track to true happiness. It’s not that the rich man can never get to heaven, because elsewhere we are told, “with God all things are possible”. Rather the poor man is primed to receive, accept and appreciate the blessings of heaven. The poor man is more ready for heaven, and perhaps, only the poor man really appreciates wealth. Who, after all, would appreciate $1,000 more, the rich man or the poor?
In just the same way, I believe there is something both psychologically and spiritually healthy about the deprivation of winter. It is not that a resident of sunny California can never appreciate their good weather, but fallen human nature weighs against them doing so. On the contrary, three months of northern sun feel like a lifetime, and after a Midwestern winter, no chance to swim in the sun is ever taken for granted.