Skip to main content

Making the Best of It


JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.)Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

I watched this video this morning and was moved, moved to find ways to make the most of it. Here is this guy skiing down hill, which is nothing spectacular, but he's not skiing down a frosted slope lined with pines, hearing only the sound of his own skis swishing through the snow. He's going down hill in a town dreary from a long winter, surrounded by houses and cars, hearing barking dogs and the noises of small-town traffic.

I'm imagining his peripheral vision as a wash of color painted with a wet brush—he sees the smear of grungy snow and ice piled high along the road, carved into at crosswalks and side streets. It's interrupted by leftover Christmas decorations, stop signs, clothes on the line. Under a sky the color of dishwater, he dodges a threatening snowball, maneuvers down steps and over parked cars.

He finally gets to the bottom and unclamps his skis, and then he boards a bus headed back uphill, to do it all over again. It's going to be great, even better the second time.

I know this video clip is part of a feature-length film about climate change—I've read the description and would like to see the full version. But for the moment, this clip represents something else to me. It represents an approach to the day-to-day. It represents determination and one of my favorite characteristics humans possess, a need and an ability to take something seemingly unpleasant and turn it into something palatable.

In 2012, we're all going to find ourselves in some unpleasant, or at least not preferable, situations. You know we are. The trick is going to be turning those situations into something palatable, or even better, something preferable. I'll choose that. I'll choose it so much that I'll get on the Up Hill bus to go back to the top and do it all over again.

Happy New Year, Blogville and all those who stop by looking for Trail bologna or a recipe for Johnny Marzetti or information about Romania and find me instead. Let's make the best of it.

Comments

dive said…
Yay! That was fun! I love the bus at the end. Thank you for that, Robyn and a very Happy New Year to you and the family.
You do realise that when it next snows you're going to have to get some skis and head out there with Baxter to make your own version of the movie (even if you just hitch him up like a huskie and get him to tow you into town - I know you've done dog-sledding so you've got no excuses … hee hee).
11:03 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...
20 comments
Read more

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...
18 comments
Read more

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...
18 comments
Read more