Heroes Not Zombies

We’ve had one of the coldest Januarys I can remember here in South West France. In the seven years I’ve been here I can only remember the odd frosty morning but this year it’s been minus a couple of degrees centigrade every morning for pretty much the whole of January.

Along with the frosty mornings sometimes we have a freezing fog which just lolls over the countryside all day long. It was like that yesterday and, so far, it’s the same today.

So it seems appropriate that as I browse photos from Januarys gone by, I come across this one. This is a photo I took from the window of the place where I lived for many years before emigrating. We lived on the top floor of a nineteenth century converted carpet mill. The flat had big arched windows and we looked out across the Carse of Stirling towards Ben Ledi and the mountains to the north. It was a view which changed every day.

This particular winter the snow fell and stayed on the ground for many weeks. There’s a real beauty in a snowscape and I think the mist adds to the atmosphere, to the feel, of this image.

This is the kind of scene I associate with winter. But the reality is most days winter is not like this, not in southern France, and not even in Central Scotland.

Our minds work this way though, don’t they? A particularly impressive scene becomes the marker, or representative of, a larger period or area. It’s only when we stand back, or apart, that we see the “bigger picture”, allowing us to be more aware of the uniqueness of whatever is right in front of us, here and now.

That’s our super power – our ability to put a little distance between ourselves and our experience so we can see both the particular and the whole.