An extreme snow event

04Feb09

It’s official! “Worst snow for 18 years brings Britain slithering to a halt…” That’s according to the Daily Mail. The BBC also tells me that south-east England had the “worst snow” it has seen for 18 years, while the Telegraph trumps that by no fewer than 24 months – it’s the “worst snow in 20 years.” What’s more – there’s “more misery ahead”. How challenging our lives will be!

What precisely, I wonder, makes this the “worst” snow? Does snow have evil motives? Was it loitering with intention, in retention at a cloud detention centre, mischievously plotting to bring our lives to a standstill? Did it want to take revenge on all those centuries when we have forced it against its nature into rotund caricatures of our fellow human beings with vegetable noses, compressed it into small pellets of punishing power, or pulverised it with our vehicles into unappealing, grey mush? This snow must be extremely angry, determined to show us its very worst behaviour.

The photograph here, on the other hand, shows my experience of Monday’s calamitous events. As I stood in my warm and welcoming kitchen, a mug cradled in my hands, I gazed out on a vision of a world purified – dusted with white, softened and inviting, glowing with all the charm of a Christmas greetings card.

This was, I was bafflingly told by the Met Office, an “extreme snow event”, something akin perhaps to the promise offered by that gravelly-toned voice-over man in cinema trailers who nowadays describes every other new film release as a “major motion picture event”.

We, as human beings, uniquely define our experiences with words and words are charged with meaning. We place ourselves at the centre of the universe and assign values to things according to how they affect us and our routine normality. This “worst” snow was nothing more than a precipitation of crystalline water ice on our lands. A crisis? Well, six million people enjoyed a day off work while children cheerily skidded, slid and skated through the most pleasurable day in living memory. I do not deny it was tough going on those who were trying to go about their normal business, but come on guys, take a heaven-sent chill-pill once every 18 years! 

I wonder how our attitude to the world and life would transform if we used words that turned experience around and saw the providence in situations that are apparently calamitous. How would our feelings about the world change if news reports began, “The human race took another step on the road to its peaceful future today when the crisis in such-and-such a place impelled leaders to work out a ceasefire…” or “The understanding that human happiness is not entirely fulfilled by materialistic pursuits was boosted today as some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs saw their stocks collapse…”

“Material fire,” Bahá’u'lláh wrote, “consumeth the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devoureth both heart and soul. The force of the former lasteth but for a time, whilst the effects of the latter endure a century.” From snow events to share collapses, we define our world and our feelings about it by the words we choose to use to describe it. Within that choice lies the options of positivity or gloom.

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Tags: Bahaullah, snow, snow event, words