You knew it had to happen.
We could not escape this winter completely without a frigid reminder of how cold winter air can get here in the Great White North.
I should preface this by pointing out, we’ve seen much colder temperatures than this. (The overnight low was about -29, which is plenty cold enough, in my humble opinion.)
About a year ago, we had a morning that was cold enough that we were able to do a -40 demonstration of throwing hot coffee into the air and seeing it dissipate into a fine mist.
It’s kind of cool, and kind of scary, to see this firsthand, and I hope never to be able to repeat that experience again — but hey, this is Canada, and it can happen.
As I watched our former colleagues April and Karlene do the demo, I was reminded of the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”, where they showed how a “perfect storm” of winter air could cause life-threatening levels of coldness.
This leads me to another tangent of thought, namely that instead of the post-apocalyptic type of movie that we often see nowadays (see the “Mad Max” movies as examples), maybe we need to think more along the lines of a post-COVID world for our future days.
The Will Smith movie, “I Am Legend”, is more along this line, and I know a lot of people didn’t like this motion picture, but it shows what a world decimated by a mega-virus could be like in the aftermath.
I am certain COVID is not the mega-virus that we all fear, but when you watch broadcast news and you get the feeling the world is burning down and we’re all going to die, some people may very well have that feeling about their future.
How should we then live?
We should live as we wish, and pursue our dreams and aspirations, and realize that “this too shall pass”. COVID is not going to be our reality forever. We won’t be rid of it, since it is a virus that has spread right around the world, but like an influenza virus, we can learn to live with it.
The virus should not the determinant of how we live, but we have to extract the fear element of what COVID is out of our mindset first. If I might make the analogy to the cold air that we are experiencing this week, it’s causing discomfort now, but it will soon be a thing of the past. Really!
