Shoveling Snow

Daily Meditation 642–12/1/2023

Where I come from, we have an old adage. We tend to get snow — a lot of snow. Some weeks of winter, there’s snow up to our waist. Other weeks, it’s past your waist and also -20f (or colder). Sometimes, it snows for days on end.

There’s a lot of people who live here who, incredibly, complain endlessly about winter.

“The sun sets at 4pm. I love going to work in the dark in the morning and clocking out to go home in the darkness.”
“I hate how cold it is and I hate scraping ice off of my car!”

“I hate shoveling snow! It’s endless!”

The adage goes along the lines of:

You can be happy and shovel the snow or you can be mad and shovel the snow, but you’re going to have the same amount of snow.

Isn’t that a beautifully Stoic and Eudaimonic way of thinking about things? That’s a perfect example of Perceptual Control as we talk about in the book and these Daily Meditations. Someone can be nasty to you, but it’s only when you decide it’s nasty that it, well, actually is nasty. When someone calls you a “faggot,” you don’t have to feel anything at all over it — you can choose to not perceive it as negative. You can choose to laugh or agree…