This past January I was downtown Billings sketching with some friends. It was fifty degrees, a heat wave for Billings in January, but it still felt cold. The previous week we were also downtown on the street drawing across the street from Rock Creek Coffee Shop and the same fifty degree temperature felt warm, comfortable. How can the same temperatures feel so different?
Like the weather, the life that unfolds in front of me doesn’t really change much, but can feel so different hour to hour, day to day, week to week, and year to year. In truth life is much more stable than the weather. Yes, we have political strife, pandemics, war, hatred, death; but every day the world still turns, the sun comes up, the trees grow, the seasons repeat. When has this not happened? What is more stable than the world out there in front of us? Yet like the temperatures in downtown Billings, I can see the same world so differently at different times.
I’ve had days when I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on. Where the idea of a future seems hopeless, or where I struggled to find anything to be happy or grateful for. Then, I also had days when I looked out across these wide plains of Montana and saw beauty in rows of wheat undulating in the wind like the waves of an ocean. Or looked down an alley in awe of the crisscross pattern of power lines connecting old brick buildings like the intricate webs of spiders. Or was heartened by the smile of a passing stranger.
Same world each day.
It would be unrealistic to think that life is always going to seem fair and right. That I can sing and dance my way through life like some modern day Mary Poppins. That there won’t be days of incredible hurt and sorrow. But the one thing I can be certain of, that I can set our watch by, is that the world will still be out there when I am ready to slip back into her saddle. The sun will come up, the wind will blow, the snow will fall, and the grass will grow in the spring.
I think it all depends where you put yourself in the scene. All we really have is the day right in front of us. It is our choice to either savor it or waste it. The same world will still be there either way.
