Here Comes The Sun

Little darling, it's been a long, long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say...it's all right.
-The Beatles

This is the happiest song I know. The melody is happy, the words are happy. It makes me happy to listen to it and I cannot help but sing along with it when I hear it. It seems like an odd song to post on the last day of November. This is the time of year when the days are so short that I drive to work in the dark in the morning and drive home in the dark in the afternoon -- we live that far north. You would think this is a song for the spring time. But it came on the radio as I was driving to work this morning and I couldn't help smile...and sing along. Me. Me who is not a morning person.

I used to get really tired of our long winters. Almost everyone here does. Winter can start any time in October or November and usually goes all the way into March. Snow is usually on the ground into the beginning of April unless we have an unusually warm spring. So people who are young and/or active do things like ice skate, or ski, or snowshoe, or whatever else gets them outdoors. You have to or you'd go crazy being cooped up that long. People still walk their dogs, run errands, and all sorts of other things. Until it gets to be 20 below. Until the wind chill drops to dangerous levels. But it's the short days where daylight is at a minimum that gets to be hard to take. And so we take our sunshine when we can get it. What people don't realize if they don't live in a cold climate is that the cloudy days are the warm days. The clouds form a layer of insulation that keeps the heat in. When it clears up, that's when the heat escapes to the upper atmosphere and temperatures drop.

What turned winter around for me was the Solstice. Calendars and weathermen had always noted the first day of winter, but I hadn't really looked at it in terms of being the Solstice. The turning point. The time of year when we celebrate the triumph of lightness over darkness. When we reach that turning point and we know that even though it is dark, and it is cold, and there are still weeks and weeks of winter left....every single day from there on out is a day of more light. And that is a wonderful, happy thing! It makes winter no big deal any more.

Which means that attitude -- perception -- is everything. It's hard to remind yourself of that when life feels crummy. When you're angry at someone. When you're looking at darkness at all the time.

You have to remind yourself there are pockets of light and find a way to look at it differently.