Snow day

It was a snow day today. Most of my classes were canceled, due to the fact that the University doesn't want people tripping and dying on snowy bricks. A good policy, in my opinion.

I got to thinking about snow. Tiny fluttering bits of snow falling to the ground and making a neat little layer of white tufts on the pavement. The snow that nips your face with cold, no matter which direction you go. Snow got me thinking about life in general and what a strange metaphor it is for humanity. In my mind, I associated snow with fragility. How pure and innocent it seems when lying on the sidewalk, or on a bridge, paved with bricks. A hand running across the stony rail could disrupt the entire thing, leaving uneven streaks of white with brick showing underneath. Small, almost petal-like drops of snow falling from a hand when it leaves the rail.

"How fragile is our existence!" is what my brain wants to scream. "How easily marred by our own interventions!" You see, a hand running across a rail can not only disrupt an almost completely natural scene, but it can also be used for far more nefarious things, like forming a snowball to throw at passers-by. This "innocent" act (which I was prone to twice today) isn't so much a question of small annoyances, or even potential but a question of instinct. There's something inside of us all that wants to deform that perfect line of snow, to trudge down and make footprints of out own on a canvas where there are none. There's something inside of us that wants to take nature, or each other, and subject it to our will. You see what I mean? Human instinct has unlimited potential for creativity. Freud's "Id" idea, again, says that all untapped creative potential lies in our subconscious. But at what cost? Our instinct to "mess with things". To mess with nature and to mess with each other. It's frightening sometimes.

Sometimes it seems to me that mankind can't leave well-enough alone. Of course, if we followed the "do no harm" instinct, we wouldn't even be able to create pine boxes to bury ourselves in time to keep up with our extinction from this earth. In short, out ability to "mess with nature" is useful. But it's also destructive. And I'm not one to go onto lengthy preachy discourses on this, but examples are obvious.

My concern is where the line is drawn. Isn't enough enough sometimes? And how far do we pry into the lives of others? That's, as Hamlet would say, the rub. I pose no solution to this dilemma. All I ask is that you think of that the next time your instinct tells you to sweep your hand across a snow-covered table, or tread a new path through snowy bricks.