Well, it is now very, very cold today; even for those of us who live in the Upper Midwest. This kind of cold used to happen on a regular basis when I was a kid (recess was inside in the gym or the hallways outside the classrooms, lots of Uno was played). But it’s more rare now, maybe once a year? We’re on our second round this month. I just wish we had some snow to go with it… alternating between April and 1995 January isn’t great for snow coverage…

Sometimes I look at the weather when it’s doing this over the last few years and try to imagine what this will look like or feel like in 10 years or harder, thirty years. This is a place I’ve known all my life but it’s not the same place (obviously! but this is the fundamental parts of it, the plants, the weather, etc) and it is almost certainly going to be a very different one when my kids are my age. The fact that the range of futures extends to include a whole bunch of ones from sci-fi books I’ve read is hard. I read the good sci-fi, so it’s not just cool space vacations! 🙂 How do you plan for that? It seems like most of my adult life it just keeps repeating where the world has something that is touted as definite and rock solid and it just goes right off a cliff and then everyone assures themselves that of course it was inevitable and no big deal.

It feels like a lack of agency, or a choice to lack agency because that also means a lack of responsibility. It helps to read history books (good ones) and see the crises and dilemmas from the past and also how people got through them even if some of them failed morally or for other reasons and the path to making a good outcome was winding and uncertain. Honestly, that’s the most reassuring thing I’ve found at the moment. That means choosing agency and responsibility though, the people who made a good outcome did a lot of hard things with no way of knowing how it would turn out, and it’s not just sitting quietly like waiting out a thunder storm.

So I’ll do my best, and I will advocate for good things where it will matter most and I will plant native flowers all around my house and grow a big garden and teach my kids to knit and sew and play piano and the names of the trees in our woods and all the good things like that. And I will win at my game of all of how local can I get for all the things and I will go for walks and read books and pet my cats and make awesome things.

So that’s some good stuff and good to think about.