Normal life is suspended. Hallelujah.

Still Life in Bristol

Last week much of the UK got its most significant snowfall for several years. As a result, everything ground to a halt, provoking the usual complaints that if Sweden, Canada et al can stay functioning with much worse for longer, why must less than six inches paralyse Britain?

It’s a good bad example of the dangers of analogous thinking. I’m actually glad that we don’t maintain huge amounts of machinery and employ people to stand around waiting for a twice a decade blip. Of course systems are better where this kind of thing is normal.

I also have another reason to be glad for the disruption. After the overnight carpeting, with snow still falling, I set off for a walk around my corner of Bristol. I was in part admiring how the snow transformed the cityscape, lending it a strange beauty. But even more I was savouring the way in which normal life had been joyously suspended.

On side streets, hardly a car moved. The few vehicles on the main roads were crawling not because of the usual congestion but because of the unusual conditions that were keeping other drivers away. Shops had hand-written signs apologising for closing early or not opening at all.

It was as though the weather had pressed a collective Pause button. For 24 hours, the heavens decreed, you will not go about your normal work, you will not strive for your usual goals, you will simply be. Time will slow down and you will slow with it. And you will enjoy it.

You could see in people’s faces that many had heeded the call. Children of all ages were sliding down every available slope, often on makeshift sledges. Very often I caught the faces of fellow spectators of these frolics and saw them smiling broadly, as I was. Here was pure and simple human benevolence at work, sheer pleasure at nothing more than the delight of others. Freezing snow melts hearts.

It seemed to me days like these were the closest we get to the Japanese custom of hanami, where people flock out to admire the brief flowering of spring trees, most commonly the sakura, the cherry. This is an almost religious observance in which nature is revered, not because, like God, it is eternal and unchanging, but because it is transient and impermanent. Hanami embracs the delights of living without grasping: you savour in full knowledge that the blossom will soon be gone, with a tinge of sadness but without complaint and with full acceptance.

In the snow of south west Britain, something of this spirit seemed to spontaneously arise. We all knew that it would either soon be gone and that normality would reassert itself, or that the disruption would start to become more of an inconvenience than a joy. So we just took it all in, accepting the gift given to us by “the beast from the east” as the storm was comically called.

Days like this were not made to last and nor should they. Much as it is nice, like the Dude, to simply abide, if that’s all we do, life is stripped of many of the projects and endeavours that give it value. Time out is only of value when there is something to take time out from.

Still, it would be a loss if the spirit of mindful enjoyment melted away completely with the snow. Snow day should serve as a reminder to take the time more often to slow down and just be more often, for a few minutes or hours at least.

 

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