If I start to write about the weather, that’d be a sign to stop writing altogether. This was a thought I had when I started writing this blog earlier this year. I mean, come on: if something as trivial as the weather is the thing I end up writing about, it must be time to review what it is I’m doing, right?
Or is it? Here’s my shot at writing about the weather because it is something that is occupying my being quite a lot these past few weeks. So here goes:
I feel like I’m living in a cave these days. A cave I will crawl out of somewhere in april next year. Winter is coming and I, excuse my language, ****ing hate it. What happened? people ask me. Because I have lived in Sweden for 20 years so you should think that I am totally used to the swedish winter darkness. This is what happened:
I freakin’ moved to Spain last winter.
It’s that simple. I moved to a sunny country for one winter and subsequently it feels I taught my body how it can also feel to live in an environment where it’s warm(er). And light(er). And these past few weeks this has been really bothering me. I go to work, it’s dark outside. I quit work, it’s dark outside again. I have a lunch break so if I’m lucky I catch some rays of sun, but many days are grey these days up in Sweden. And this year, this is really messing with my body and my being.
If you don’t live in Sweden, this might be hard for you to grasp. But I can assure you: it’s a thing, not getting enough natural light. At least for me! And I know I’m not the only one. I honestly don’t understand how people can live even more far up north, where it’s dark 24 hours right now. But we’re all different of course…
So what to do? In my case it’s pretty simple. My teenagers want to live in Stockholm for the remaining years they live at home, so Stockholm it is. Regardless of how I feel personally, I’m a mum first so that’s just it. These were the stages I went through the past few weeks, struggling with this subject:
I found myself crying one morning on the Gullmarsplan subway station platform. It was 6.30 in the morning, dark outside and a cold wind was blowing. Add to this the most ugly, unfriendly, un-inspiring subway station existing in the Stockholm public transportation network and this was enough to tip me over the edge that particular morning. I just felt so strongly that this is not where I long to be. It just isn’t.
I then spent the next days fighting and struggling with the fact that my life right now includes the dark winter and the early mornings commuting with uncommunicative stockholmers in dark clothes. I’m not kidding: try finding someone with a colourful coat (or a smile on their face) early on a weekday morning on a subway carriage in winter-y Stockholm. It’ll take you quite a while, I promise.
And then I suddenly, thankfully, came to a point where I could see myself extremely clearly. All of a sudden I saw again what I was doing. I was fighting something that is totally and utterly worthless fighting: the Present Moment.
It’s exactly what the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says in his world-famous book The Power Of Now:
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
Oh jeez, it’s like: will I never learn?!? Life is right now. It’s precious and it’s short. When I write this it feels like such a cliché but it’s So True. No one knows what tomorrow holds. I feel that it’s so easy to walk through life feeling like we’re in control but we really aren’t. And time after time life reminds me about this. I have an incredible amount of things to be deeply grateful for, starting with my health. Why is it sometimes difficult to keep focus on the things in life that are truly remarkable but that instead are so often taken for granted?
Yes, winter is coming. I have made an active choice to keep focus on all the good stuff in my life and the weather just is a part of the present moment that I now fully accept. It really makes things easier. That, and lots of vitamin D…
Photo: Oliva Basile – unsplash.com