On a chill night (and a warm heart)

Sometimes, in the dead of summer, we forget that in a few short months, the heat will be replaced by icy winter paths – shivers, tingling faces and a chill wind blowing around the ears.

What does this changeable environment mean?

Being cold reminds me that I am alive.

Today I was in Ottawa, walking along the Mooney’s Bay, late in the evening, feeling the wind penetrate first my coat, then my sweater and finally my shirt, before enveloping my skin, lowering my body temperature.

I looked across the bay and saw sparkling lights strewn across the inky black water, large stars against a black night. The lights danced and bobbed with the wavelets and in the cadence of the cars that passed, obscuring them for a fleeting second, and then letting them wink back into electric flame.

Every day, we see things. Scenes that seem so mundane and boring — the landscapes of the everyday, framed against the sounds and fury of the roads, people’s cries and the general hubbub of the city. We know it so well that it becomes the beat of our lives and eventually goes silent.

What do we replace the noise and sights of the fascinating world around us with, once we no longer notice them?

I think that the answer is that we can never stop noticing them – for it is in this quiet awareness of the world that we draw our own identity. Not only in the rough-hewn categories of sociological or cultural identity, but in the identity that comes of how we appreciate the symphony and counterpoint of the world’s music, urban and rural; in the identity that comes of seeing the forest and its flowers and the light penetrating in beams of light through the branches. In the crackle of snow and ice under our boots as we walk. In the peels of laughter of others reacting to a good joke or a funny situation.

That is the music of life and its visual arts, its tapestries. Our ability to notice and translate what we see and hear is our identity. Our ability to draw inspiration from it is the source of our creativity and, really, our humanity.

 

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *