Yesterday brought freezing rain to our area. It wasn’t too terribly bad, but it was enough for to have school cancelled and the Y to close due to traveling concerns.
For the most part, it was a cold, overcast, dark”ish,” and icy kind of day. Not something you want to go out and spend a lot of time playing around in.
The day before had brought a bit of a snowstorm, so that meant two missed days of run training. Between weather and restricted movement, it’s easy for your mood to kind of bottom out into unmotivated lethargy.
I did NOT want to get and up and go to the Y this morning. There was a piece of me hoping the ice would have it on a delayed start causing my session to be canceled. But nope. It was on schedule and my training appointment was still a go.
And wouldn’t you know it? Today would be the day I learned the difference between ice…and ICE.
We’ve had ice on the car many mornings this winter. It’s usually just a matter of turning the car on for a few minutes and taking a scraper to the toughest spots. With a little bit of elbow grease and warmth blasting up from the dash…it’s good to go in pretty short order.
Not so, today.
That thin layer of ice was welded on the glass like a second skin and it was not about to come off without a fight. A glance at my watch told me I was definitely NOT going to make it on time, if I even got there at all. After turning the inside of the car into a mobile sauna and cringing through the harsh sound of scraping what amounted to the ice version of barnacles from around my windows, I could finally see enough to jump in and hit the road.
I was REALLY not feeling it by this time, having left the rest of my mood littering the pavement of my driveway along with the ice. But I motored my scowling visage down the road, shoulders hunched in protest, while willing the feeling to return to my painfully tingling fingers.
It was about that time when the sunlight really started shining through the trees from the east.
The very ice which had aggravated me such a short time before was now showing off in a rare display of prisms and refracted glory as I made my way into the Y.
I muddled through my session and stayed longer to make up for the workouts I had missed and felt better for having done so.
Upon leaving, the sun was out in full force, winking in anticipation of its artistry. It continued to dance and chase after me, inviting a closer look at how it had transformed the barren objects of winter into this spectacular play of lights reflecting off ice encased skeletons, which would have seemed otherwise drab and lack-luster without the aid of its icy armor.
I sat in the parking lot of the grocery store, looking at the bare branches of a tree, without fruit, without bloom, with no apparent evidence it had anything positive to offer the world at large at that given minute.
Except for the fact that, covered in ice from the storm, with the sun painting its form in natural highlights of white light and dark shadow, it was this extraordinary, amazing, thing of beauty.
I think of how I feel in my darkest times…on my darkest days. How easy it is to feel like that barren branch in the dead of winter; cold, useless, having nothing worthwhile to offer, a plain, fruitless stick of a being, without warmth or care.
This was a welcome reminder that the sun can still shine after the storm. And sometimes, it takes being covered in something new…to reveal what you always thought was ordinary…is actually something extraordinary after all.
Try not to be afraid to live your “new.” You just might find yourself blinding someone with the extraordinariness of your ordinariness.
So, smile friends, and be well.