A friend from Miami once told me that until he came to Northwestern, he never understood why weather was always the default conversation topic in movies and on TV. In Miami, the temperature hardly varies from the yearly average of 76 degrees. The weather is always there, but rarely remarkable, and bringing it up in conversation would be like saying “Hey, what’s your nose up to?” Because the answer is most likely “nothing at all.”
Here, however, that’s far from the case. The weather is such a talking point, in fact, that often seems like we spend all of Winter Quarter bemoaning the cold and wind and snow. Once Spring Break is in sight, it seems like all of campus becomes afflicted with tunnel vision, placing all our hopes on a better, warmer spring. We disregard the weeks of winter still left, and the uniquely wintry experiences they make possible, like enjoying a mug of cocoa and having a snowball fight. And once spring arrives, it seems like nothing but a lengthy exercise in patience, waiting for a warmer day that hardly arrives. The result is that we get caught in our own meteorological purgatory, and fail to appreciate each day in its own right.
Winter days weigh heavy on our shoulders, to be sure. There may not be a gloomier feeling than contemplating your impossible burden of work, sniffling back the dregs of a never-ending cold, and reading a forecast that promises such delights as below-zero wind chills and a “wintry mix” of snow and rain. It’s achy, bitter and dreary, and an experience we all have in common.
This, perhaps, is the reason it’s so “Northwestern” to bandy around our collective hatred of winter, engaging in a constant mindless conversation of how much “winter sucks” and how excited we are for spring, pronouncing the phrase as if the very word for the season is a magic elixir that will solve all our problems.
Winter Quarter, though, is almost over, and soon it will be spring, or more accurately, waiting-for-spring, since the slow procession towards good weather seems to drag on for months. We effectively put our lives on hold, hanging all our hopes and plans on this metaphorical warm tomorrow, until imperceptibly, with an apparent suddenness, we’ll look around and all the grass and trees will be freshly green, and we’ll wonder when it happened. I’ll plan picnics on the beach and trips to the Lincoln Park Zoo, telling everyone all the things we’ll do “when the weather’s nicer.” Inspiration itself gets crossed out and pushed back to a later date, again and again until the school year unravels and we fly our separate ways for the summer.
The problem is that spring introduces expectations, and so the weather never seems quite good enough. Though a 50-degree day would be heralded as incredible in February, we want more out of spring, and knowing that it could be warmer casts a chill on what would be an enjoyable day. But it doesn’t have to be this way; it’s all in our heads, anyhow. By making everything relative we give more value to some days than others, to warm over cold and sunny over cloudy. The weather, however, is something we have no control over. It’s simply a backdrop to our days, a variable fabric that flows behind all our experiences.
I wish it were easier to retain a child’s perspective on the world, to run out in the rain just because it’s wet and not worry about your books and clothes getting soaked or how silly you’ll look with your hair plastered to your face. Inevitably, we don’t — we get older and fall victim to common sense. But if we practice, from time to time, accepting the weather as it comes, blustery and frigid or puddly and wet, there’s so much more to enjoy, and we’ll find things we didn’t even know we loved, like running in a downpour without an umbrella or admiring the way the ice piles up like broken glass on the shores of Lake Michigan or piling on an impossible number of layers just to sit in the snow and enjoy a Freezepop. Those are the things I’ll remember from this quarter, anyhow, and they’re all things I couldn’t have experienced if I’d locked myself in my room and counted down the days until beach weather.
Whether we like it or not, the weather is a talking point in Evanston. It’s harsh and unpredictable and full of unwelcome surprises (like thunderstorms in February and snow in April) but if you open yourself up to it, it’s also jam-packed with the stuff that makes things remarkable and memorable, and this is what we should hold on to.