The New Season

You never know when you'll wake up to a whole new world.

Today, it snowed. I opened my curtains, and the trees and the steets were covered with a thin layer of white. Yesterday was autumn, today is winter.

And there it went. Fall had come and gone, with the blink of one eye... and yet, so much had happened.

So I put on a hat—a winter hat. I went outside into the cold. I stepped into puddles of slush, over and over again, as if I had forgotten how to avoid them. With a smile on my face, my hands froze, my feet and my pants got drenched. And whenever I stepped inside, I felt the warm slowly creep over my body. I closed my eyes, and saw myself sitting by a campfire, feeling the fire on my face.

Everybody must have been dreading today. Our first snow. The beginning of the end. The start of shivers and the end of ice cream. But for some odd reason, I liked today. It was a brand new day. A brand new season. A brand new excuse to start over again.

Fall might be coming back tomorrow. There might not be any trace that any snow had happened. And Fall will stick around for another week, or maybe two...

But winter will be back. Just because it's meant to be that way.

Who knows... Maybe winter won't be so bad this year.

Options...

I remember Jonathan being so happy when we found out we could go to Marineland. It was the highlight of the day. It was going to be amazing. Then, the option of going to Wonderland arose... and my god, Jonathan was thrilled. But because his grandparents didn't want to go to Wonderland, we had to go back to plan A - Marineland. At this point, Jonathan was so upset, so angry at his grandparents. "But why? You were so happy to go to Marineland two hours ago!" I asked. "That was before we could go to Wonderland!"

If we didn't have options, we'd be happy with our status quo. Like I was telling my friend Louis, if he had never offered to drive me all the way to Cornwall for my driving exam, I would have be perfectly fine with taking the bus. But if he had cancelled on me, I would've felt completely terrible to have had to take the bus as a consequence.

Maybe that's why people are so afraid of change. We all get so comfortable in our little bubbles, living life as we know it. If no new nor better things presented themselves to us, if we were never aware that bigger and brighter things could happen to us, we'd be perfectly happy and content with whatever we already had.

If Frank didn't have a cellphone, he'd manage just fine with an answering machine. If Olivia didn't have a microwave, she would simply do all her cooking without one. If Julie didn't have Paul to hold the door for her, she would've been perfectly okay to open the door for herself. If John didn't have Sandra to give him a wake up call, he would wake up to the sound of his own alarm.

What's my point, you ask? Well.. Let me just say this. I know that no matter what, at the end of the day, I'm going to be just fine. If I was doing well before a certain option presented itself into my life, there's no reason why I should be devastated when that certain thing doesn't happen to work out. It's just that feeling of disapointment, that feeling of crushed hope, of failed possibilities.. one after the other... that's what's tiring, draining and discouraging.