I guess this is all caused by the fact that the sun set at 4:40PM and darkness swallows several hours of an afternoon. The crisp autumn air and the mild temperature cannot save the day when daylight shrinks so much.
When you have the winter blue, just think about those people who live closer than us to the Arctic Circle. They don’t have sunlight much at all during the winter time. Actually don’t think about the modern people who have electricity; think about those who live in the eras before light bulbs coming into existence. I bet they cooked and ate their dinner under insufficient candle lights and kitchen accidents happened rather frequently. I could be burning myself or cutting myself with my clumsiness in such an environment. Well, being a modern woman is a blessing.
“But under the candle light, our ancestors ate organic food.” My friend E would say that, but E belongs to those rare people who could see a silver lining in a hurricane cloud.
When you have the winter blue, just think about this quote, “If Winter come, can Spring be far behind?” This will cheer you up. In an instant, I start to imagine the bare trees and the wilted leaves alive again next spring. Be optimistic, but not too optimistic like Percy Shelley, who could defy his legacy and the society by reckless marriages and publications that delight his readers. He is immortal, but for mortals like us we just can’t do what he was doing. It’s the same with dreams. One has to be so optimistic as to have a dream, but one can’t be too optimistic to expect too much out of it. When we say I dream of doing something or being somebody, we are talking about our specific desires, not really our dreams. If you try to recall the real dreams you have, you are going to see how amorphous, aimless, disorganized they are. If we follow dreams like that, we are going nowhere.
If you have the winter blue, think about those people who love you, those who make you laugh, and those who you love. Let me see. I probably would choose those who make me laugh to think about, and try not to think about love since I have a lot of regrets in love, but you are different from me and you can think of love as much as you can.
Let me think who makes me laugh. However my thoughts just cannot dwell on comedy right now. I think of people I love and I have to tell you a story of mine. When I was in high school, the son of my mother’s friend liked me a lot. I expected every day that he would declare his passionate exclusive love for me. Then one day he said at the dinner table, where we were all gathering for a summer meal, that I was so terribly young. He sighed. He was about eight years older than me. I thought he’s making me a compliment and I smiled sweetly at him. The next day, however, he brought his girlfriend home, a very beautiful girl, to introduce her to his mother and all of us. I felt so betrayed.
I forgive him now so many years later and I guess my forgiveness help lift my spirit in such a dreary November day.
Haoyan Do 