We're in the latter half of the winter, where it's shorter to go ahead to spring than to retreat back to fall if we even could. It's the home stretch, but it's perhaps the most miserable.
The days are getting noticeably longer, but that has done little to break the outdoor cold that infiltrates our bodies and leaves us shivering and muttering about the frozen wasteland we've chosen to make a life for ourselves.
For the most, weather is the most obvious, boring and pointless thing to talk about. Oscar Wilde said, "Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
I think of those words anytime someone mentions the heat, the cold, the snow, the gloomy cloud cover, the rain or what the long-range forecast has to say about the weather in the future.
Despite that, it's this time of year that we have to pull ourselves together, check ourselves mentally and make every attempt to treat each other with the grace everyone deserves. The cold may make people cranky and irritable. The more we're aware that we're probably cranky and irritable the easier to is to put that garbage aside and smile at the people we encounter each day.
Cold weather does nothing to cheer us up, but it still might be a whole lot better than heat, which has been found to make people aggressive. It seems we just get downright violent when the humidity gets up and our shirts start sticking to our chests, inhibiting our already raspy breathing.
So we find little victories all over the place to motivate us and brighten our days a little. It doesn't matter what you celebrate, anything counts as a win. An evening meeting was cancelled and you don't have to face the skin-searing cold again tonight; you slammed hard on the brakes and spilled steaming hot coffee on your face but it feels more like a warm bath; or maybe you just remembered to take your vitamin D tablet. Who needs the sun anyway?
In summer, we play, but in winter we just have to survive. It's at this time of year, we really begin to question whether we can still do it, whether we really have what it takes to outlast winter. Many people then, will give up and go south, unable to bear another day eyeing up snowdrifts with a stiff upper lip.
For those who decide to stay, it turns out they will focus very intently on their work. We've all found it's difficult or even nearly impossible to have a pleasant, peaceful and gorgeous day mocking us just beyond our office window. It's so easy to get distracted during those summer months and daydream about not working.
I recently read of a Harvard Business School professor who found people generally do so much more work when the weather is uninviting, and the frozen hellscape that awaits all of us living in the Prairies provides just such an environment that is undesirable enough to get us to focus on our work.
That sounds like another victory.
