Finally some inspiration came

            The day crept in through my sleeping bag as a familiar “ding-da-ling” goes off to wake me up. Through my half-moon skylight drift a few lost flakes of snow. Is it really snowing? I think. I suppose it must be. I can’t here any wind, so these can’t be flakes blown in from snowdrifts. My body rolls out of the sleeping bag into a freezing cold, circular room that is too small for me to stand erect. At a small washbasin my teeth are brushed. After which I grab two boiled eggs and break them on the corner of the table. My stomach devours them, and soon enough I am out in a cold white sheet.

            The first day of snow has always had a strange affect on me. Why, I wonder? The earth covering itself in snow is an act of erasing. Like a student who made a mistake with his verb conjugation, the mistake is covered in a sea of white. It makes me think. Every year we observe this. No matter the mistakes, the world covers them up, they dissolve into the white, and spring comes to create new possibilities. Is it in human beings as well? Do we use the nature of the seasons to refresh ourselves?

            My reaction, then, makes perfect sense. My mind reacting to the implication that, in a short time, all will be cleared away. Life will start anew. Unfortunately, emotion can never be so simply explained. Human beings may have the capacity to be rational, but we also embody the irrational. Emotions simply cannot always be explained. The more we experience them, the more we see them, the easier it is to accept them. That doesn’t make them any less illogical. We can understand a child’s tantrum, we can empathize with a lover’s betrayal. Our experiences develop our emotional intelligence.

            The stranger part of emotion is the fact that truth affects it little. Rationalized emotion does not disappear. When we perceive the root of sadness to have been discovered, the sadness does not disappear. Sadness is not a weed. You cannot spray the root and kill the plant. Indeed, treating emotion as an opponent never made the emotion any weaker. I can defeat sadness with great mental effort. I can exercise to forget my troubles. I can watch TV to flood my system with dopamine, or I can just take a pill with lots of dopamine in it. But, in the end, the emotion returns; often stronger than before. Emotion cannot be fought and defeated.

            I ask my body to move over the rough ground to my school. The padded earth engulfs the sounds of my breathing, my footsteps. Only cars are heavy enough to break through to the earth below. Even then, their sound is quickly absorbed by the surrounding snow. I glance up to the sun, hiding behind thinly spread clouds creating a false mountain landscape. I think of how the sun hides the stars from my eyes. Truly, the light from those stars still hits my eyes. The sun just conceals their distinguished existences from me. There’s nothing quite like looking at the sun behind clouds to make one feel like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. Certainly not in the idea of burning, but in the frailty of existence. Like the half-concealment of the sun suggests its entire disappearance.

            Now I sit quietly in the faculty room. A seasonal pine rises to just outside the second story window. Below, out on the concrete playground, two small boys are playing a version of tag with three girls using a foursquare box. One girl stands much taller than the others. She manages her height well. Quite the opposite of a lanky youth, she jumps smoothly past the boy as he lunges after her. The fresh snow doesn’t keep any of them from sprinting and stopping, only to find themselves well out-of-bounds. Rather than learn from the constant slips and falls, the slides become an integral part of the game. I look to the sun and realize it has come from behind the clouds. Was it the life in the children’s game that brought it out, or did it breathe the life into the game?

            As I try to remember which came first, I hear the class bell ring. The school springs to life. Children’s voices rush down the halls. Teachers stop by the faculty room to steel for the next lesson. I sit and watch quietly, not a strange experience for either me or them. I can see the last lesson leak from them as they breathe sluggishly and talk with one another. As soon as they reach the doorway of the next classroom, a spring will return to their step, a spark to their voice. The children will consume it all in the next 40 minutes, and they will return to this room, mustering up for the next 40-minute diffusion. And what separates these men and women from others becomes abundantly clear. Every day they give a piece of themselves for the sake of others. But they don’t hold a grudge for it. They savor it.

            As I walk to my lesson, I remember that I was thinking about the sun and the children playing, and before that, the nature of human emotion. How did my mind jump so freely from subject to subject? Or was it free at all? Was it really just dependent upon the impressions of the world around me? The truly frustrating part is that my mind always jumps to the next subject right when I feel that I am on the verge of a great realization. Maybe that goes back to the nature of emotion. When I try to control my thoughts and feelings, they often escape me. I must learn to let my thoughts go where they will. But if I let them go where they will, can I be sure that they will mean anything?