Digging In

Everyone has their own way of pushing their limits. Some run marathons. Some climb mountains. Some adopt intense exercise routines that would make Captain America gasp for breath.  

Me? Shoveling out a Colorado spring will do just fine, thank you.

I know I’ve got a lot of company here. If you didn’t have a blower, a service or an ally last week, you got to have your own personal encounter with Nature’s own concrete. The sort of wet, dense, heavy stuff that has to be cleared out in layers, testing your spinal column with every scoop.

“GrrrrAAAAA!”

And of course, Colorado’s snow fights back. If you tried to get a jump on the situation last Sunday, you may have had the joy of turning around at the end of a fervent shoveling session to discover your path had been covered over again. Multiple times.

In my case, my brain and heart love snow but my back and knees beg to differ. So with a big storm, I shovel the way some people read “War and Peace” – many short quick bursts rather than one long stretch. (I also have the blessings of helpful neighbors doing their own part and then some, which I’m pretty sure you don’t get with Russian novels.)

It’s tedious. It’s exhausting. More often than not, you feel like you’re making no progress at all. But you keep going because you have to.

That seems to apply to a lot of life, lately.

For some, it’s a year of pandemic existence hitting the mind all at once as a vaccine starts to come into view. So much has been endured, and with a light in the distance the last laps suddenly feel so agonizingly slow.

For some, it’s yet one more shooting in one more city with one more burst of racial hate that shakes the soul with its vehemence. A cycle we seem to keep running like a murderous version of Groundhog Day, a little more fatigued and desperate for each repetition.

For some, it’s not the global but the personal. A stubborn health situation. A broken family relationship. A life that seems to keep pounding the same streets and hitting the same blocked alleys.

Maybe there’s progress, somewhere. Maybe you can even see it, if barely. But it just … seems … oh … so … slow.

You’re not wrong. You’re not crazy.

But you’re not hopeless either.

You’re still in the fight.

And even if it feels like carving Mount Rushmore with a toothpick, every scratch is something. Simply not falling off the mountain is something.

A 10-minute burst against the snow never looks like much. Especially when it keeps coming down. But if we keep finding another 10 minutes … however far apart … things can start to change.

 And when a friend or a neighbor starts to lend their own shovel (or even their blower), that next 10 minutes starts to look more possible.

Sooner or later, snow melts on its own. Most other problems aren’t quite as obliging. But if we persist – if we lend each other the strength to persist – we can make a difference. To ourselves. To our neighbors. Maybe even to the world.

It won’t be easy. It often hurts. But if we pick up the shovel at all, we’re saying it can be done. That even if we can’t do all of it, we can do our piece.

That’s hope.

And that’s an exercise that will make all of us stronger.

There’s Snow Season Like Spring

When March comes, some places get songbirds.

Some get the first hints of green and an early flower or two.

Some blessed spots even get the sounds of baseball – a refrain growing since dismal, bleak February – and a promise that The Season with its infinite possibilities will soon arrive.

And then there’s Longmont. We get Paul Revere of the Yukon, on every channel.

“The blizzards are coming! The blizzards are coming!”

It’s not that they’re always wrong. It might be easier if they were. But we know that March is Longmont’s snowiest month. We know that sudden snowfalls and paralyzing drifts can happen. We know that entire weekends, even entire weeks, can be set to the drone of the snow blower and the groan of the snow shoveler.

And so, we prepare. Maybe with a cynical chuckle and a roll of the eyes, but we prepare. And when the snowstorm turns out to be staggeringly ordinary or even non-existent, we nod, and sigh, and say “Those forecasters.”

Because we know the times that we don’t prepare, the times that we decide it’s all bunk, maybe even the times that the forecasters themselves don’t take it seriously – that will be when Suzie Snowflake holds a debutante ball over half the Front Range.

And now we know what it means to be as mad as a March Hare. The dang rabbit has gone insane from trying to make weekend driving plans.

But it’s not without benefit. Each year, we learn a very particular set of skills (with apologies to Liam Neeson). We learn to stay on the alert without staying paralyzed. To weigh possibilities and gauge best-case and worst-case scenarios. And when the need arises, we learn how to buckle down, do the job, and watch out for our neighbor.

In short, we learn one of the most relevant skill sets there is these days.

We have a lot of things claiming to be emergencies these days. Some truly are urgent. Some are important, but magnified and distorted. And some … some exist strictly in the mind of the proclaimer, exuding an accuracy and trustworthiness that make Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf look like Willard Scott.

That’s where we need to listen with a mind trained by March.

No one can respond to all the alarm bells. No one can ignore every one either. And so, if we’re smart, we greet them with a mix of wariness and preparation. What do the facts say, not just the images? What’s the cost of acting? Of not acting? What’s the smart action, not just the popular one?

It’s not easy. It means reining in instincts that go back to the Stone Age, urging us to move into action at the slightest hint of danger. But it also means that we don’t live half-ready to spring, with a tension that seeps into everything we do. Perspective doesn’t just dial up preparation, it dials down stress.

And when that happens, we’re not just ready to help ourselves and our community. We’re ready to find joy in it.

Yes, a sudden snowstorm requires work and caution (PLEASE be careful on the roads!), and assistance to others. It also transforms expectations, turning a world we’ve seen a  thousand times into something new. Even beautiful. It muffles, forcing us to pause in our regular lives, to draw inward for a bit and contemplate.

And around here,  it remains the truest sign we have that spring is just around the corner.  At least until we hear the crack of the bat and the promise that this year, the Rockies are going to win it all.

Whether that’s a true forecast, or just one more snow job, I leave up to you.