It's Here

The winter of my discontent. Or the discontent of my winter.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." If a year were a day, the winter would be 3am for me, day after day.

It's cold, cold to the marrow of my bones. And I live in Florida! That's how big a wuss I am when it gets under 50 degrees. I tell myself to "suck it up and be a man", but the cold does something to me, deeper than the shivers. My feet and hands get so cold, and it's hard to think when my brain has icicles hanging from its wrinkles. My senior year of college, when I lived in an old house without central air or heat, I remember being certain I'd never really feel warm again.

But I did. Hemingway has a great quote about springtime in Paris, that winter lasts so long that you almost become afraid that spring won't make it. You begin to think that it won't happen, but one night you wake up and see the blossoms on the trees brought on by a warm wind in the night. Suddenly, when things are green again, I realize that I've thawed out completely before I knew I'd even begun to defrost.

So I have that hope to look forward to. Until then, it's cold. There are certain wintertime comforts, like family holidays, fireplaces and football that cheer me, but UGH, it's COLD. It gets colder after the World Series, and the absence of baseball exacerbates this feeling.

But it's still winter, and it's just beginning. My pre-New Year's resolution will be to seek every wintertime silver lining I can, to not just view it as the frozen hell I have to pass through before I get to the heaven of spring, but its own special time. Somehow, I may even come to embrace the low temperature and ignore the physiological effects it has on my body.

In the immortal words of Brett Favre, "It's mind over matter; if you don't mind, it don't matter."