hats off!

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A gloppy snowfall bows trees and bushes around here. The maple next door, a failing beast whose limbs have been trimmed and wired in an effort to save it, shows new signs of distress ... a distress that may bombard my driveway with car-damaging limbs. Telephone and electrical wires are laden with ornate, thin walls of white.

It is a day full of revised plans. My sons get a "snow day," which means they don't have to go to school...but do have to get out and shovel, which may make them wish school had opened. My daughter, if her college is open, will go despite it all -- she's tough and determined.

It's pretty easy to get into a revised-plan mode when something like this snowfall arrives. The easy drive to bank or supermarket -- things I had planned to do -- now require rethinking, reframing and perhaps some crankiness that an easy plan had been so easily thwarted. Circumstances arise and "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men, do oft times go awry (gang aft agley)."

The snow is an obvious thing.

But I think it is less obvious that replanning and rethinking is what anyone does all the time ... all the time. Not a moment goes by when circumstances don't dictate a nudge this way or that. It's so subtle, perhaps, that we get used to ignoring what we are doing and focus instead on our "successes" or "failures" as occasioned by circumstances and desire. We plan. We succeed. We fail. And, when the snow is obvious enough, we revise.

Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, what we call life is thrown into a cocked hat. All the time. But is it life that is thrown into a cocked hat? Is life dismayed or delighted? Does life wear a hat, cocked or otherwise? Of course not: I wear a hat, I make plans, I revise my plans, I am dismayed or delighted.

Just noodling and thinking that life's 'benevolent' course deserves our attention, even when it's not snowing:

Hats off to life!

So to speak.
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