Today was a very hot day here in Toronto,
and it really- it’s really going to be the last hot day for many months.
It was full t-shirt and shorts weather,
really hot,
humid,
full summer weather.
And it’s now going into October,
and it’s gonna get cold.
And so my thought for today is about how significant that was to me,
and I wonder why.
Why does it matter?
For some reason,
I love to follow the seasons and the weather.
There’s a few things that I think they do.
The most basic thing is that the weather is our physical environment.
It is physical reality.
It’s real.
There’s not many things that we can say are more real than the weather.
Feeling- feeling of hunger- the feeling of hunger is real.
Pain is real.
The feeling of the earth beneath our feet.
And the weather really connects us to that basic physical sensation of reality.
So for people who live in- we live in this constructed world where almost everything is- almost everything we deal with is a constructed human world.
There’s something so refreshing and real about just straight-up weather.
And the idea with the seasons: the seasons are about change and time.
The seasons changing really bring out the feeling of time moving on.
When you have a season- when it’s going on- it sometimes has that feeling that it could go on forever,
when- summer into July in August,
winter into February in March here,
feels like they can go on forever.
But when you see those signs of the change into the new season,
it then- it hits you.
It hits me,
the feeling that now,
wow,
look at all the time that has passed,
and look where we are now.
So both of those things are very useful for what I care about,
which is living a meaningful life,
which is what this is all about.
The weather itself,
grounding in simple physical reality,
helps to get out of the head,
get out of the thoughts of the past and the future,
get out of manufactured thought systems,
and just bring it back to the basics of the body,
physical reality,
here it is,
it’s hot,
it’s cold,
it’s raining,
it’s sunny.
Very basic,
real things,
undeniably real,
unfiltered by any human influence.
Although thankfully,
the human influence of a roof and heaters and so on: those are very useful human influences.
But the weather itself,
to have that raw nature,
is- it really helps to get out of thought holes,
the thought holes that are so easy to dig into.
And with the changing of the seasons,
that feeling of wow,
time is passing,
wow,
so much time has gone: that feeling helps to be the shock to the system to say okay,
how am I using my time?
When time feels like it goes on forever,
it’s easy to waste it.
But when we feel the shortness of time.
Any- it’s just another of those triggers that can help us to feel the shortness of time.
And when we get that hit,
when we are reminded of how much time is passing,
how quickly time is going,
that can be helpful to have that bracing effect of OK,
wow,
I can’t just be sliding along here.
I have to use this day.
This day is a very valuable day.
So these are the thoughts I had today as we have both incredibly hot weather and the knowledge that this is almost certainly the last such day until long after the end of winter here,
as we start to dip the very beginnings into the cold season.
And so that feeling of time passing is once again hitting me strong.
Went for a walk and just soaked it up,
and there’s something so simple and good about it.
So yeah,
weather.
Talking about the weather.
Simple but real.
There it is,
and I’m glad to be alive to have the chance to experience it.