Woohoo! It’s already up to eighteen degrees here in River City this morning! On its way to a predicted twenty-six degrees… It’s almost comical how pleasant an unpleasant thing can seem after a couple of weeks of pain. Almost.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to quickly adapt to a remarkable variety of factors: cold, heat, and deprivation of a number of sorts. Equally remarkable and much less impressive is our capacity to become spoiled in a very short time. Someone else shovels our sidewalk a few times and we come to expect it. Someone else does the laundry and we soon feel that is the natural order of things. Someone else sweeps our floors, empties our trash and turns out the lights and we rather enjoy that particular division of labor.

It is an easy temptation for us to become overly adjusted to a certain level of spoiling and lose our compassion for others less spoiled. Being poor does not guarantee empathy for other poor people any more than being rich guarantees indifference. Each rung of the economic ladder seems to carry its own inclinations. What would be good, in a number of ways, actually, is to deliberately cultivate a habit of gratitude both for the blessings we receive and for the sparing from worse afflictions.

To apply a bit of a twist to an old adage, it is better to give thanks for the coat than to curse the cold. Better yet to live a life that is controlled by something more powerful than the weather.

H. Arnett
1/11/10