Tired but Happy part 2

A few more days have passed since I had intended to finish up this note. However, it seems providence has provided a few more things to enable me to finish this up quite nicely.

Some of you may be familiar with a movie called, "Pleasantville". This movie spoke to many things, but the one I wanted to emphasize was the sense of people living "life as it should be", rather than the life they could live, but might be a bit more risky or scary, but also more fulfilling. The movie is set in the 1950's, and as such, is also filmed in black and white. Thus, my earlier reference to living in a black and white world, or existence. Since moving here, I have really felt as if I had gone back in time about 30 years. Everything seemed so backwards and "old", especially seen in the buildings around me, which, unlike California, have often been there much longer, since there have been no earthquakes here to destroy them. And, on days (or weeks) when the weather is cold and gray outside, with no sunshine in sight, it can often seem as though life is old and gray. Especially in Winter, I so miss the life I knew in California, with all the signs of life around me; the ocean, the wind, the sunshine on my face, the many colors in the flowers and foliage, the many activities of the people around me, and the animals on land and sea. Whenever I have had the opportunity to visit California in the winter, I am always amazed by the vividness of the colors around me. The flowers almost shout to me of their liveliness in their bright hues. It is hard to ignore them.

The contrast to living here is unmistakable. And, somehow, it seems that life imitates art here as well. The black and white exterior of life seems to embody the lives of the people who live here, and I don't know which came first. (We'll bypass the whole chicken and the egg thing). This is now my 16th winter spent in this place. I have had time to contemplate this to some extent. This has given me some insight into things, a bit of understanding about why people here are the way they are. I can understand getting sucked into the depressiveness of the weather, the cold, the gray, and over the years, to kind of come to expect this as a part of the life cycle, or the seasons of the year, etc. It can bring about a sense of the sameness of life, of having a set of expectations that are rarely challenged, and even a sense of the stoic, as if "I've gotten through it", or, "it won't get the best of me", a sense of being hearty, hale, and in that, also a non-questioning of the status quo, because by doing so, you might tip the equilibrium and upset things, at which point, chaos ensues. Yet, in all this time, I have yet to find a way to transform my own experience so that I could maximize the time of winter, in order that it doesn't bring me into depression, or lull me into a state of "just getting through", going about my day to day activities in a kind of mind-numb that parallels the feeling in my feet when I stand outside in the snow too long. Living in the status quo. There is no change to the monotony of cold, but I don't want that monotony to seep into the rest of my life.

This may seem to be rambling, but I am getting to the point. The question for me has been, "What will change things?" And, up until now, I haven't had an answer to that. To read the answer, tune in tomorrow, when I will finally (hopefully) finish this up!