Wide shot of an overcast city

How to Practice Gratitude in Miserable Weather

This is a follow-up to my previous article “It’s Hygge Time!”

The extended winter-a-thon continues in my city of Toronto.

I, like many others in this city, eyed the weekly forecast desperately, and looked forward to the weather prediction this week: a high temperature of 14⁰ Celsius (or just shy of 60⁰ Fahrenheit for you ‘Mericans out there).

This might not sound significant, but it bears noting that the city hasn’t breached double-digits in about 4 weeks. Since March.

An entire month of single-digit temperatures, with only a brief taste of the changing seasons in early March. The Canuck struggle is REAL.

So you can forgive me for getting a tad giddy when I saw the prediction of moderately warm temperatures. Only, it fell on the same day we were getting precipitation. And a special weather advisory, calling for freezing rain by the end of the day, leading into another long stretch of single-digit days.

So basically, the morning would be cold and wet, and the evening would be icy and slick.

This left about a 3-hour window of uncharacteristically mild weather to enjoy.

So what did I do? I took advantage of it.

The sun even made an appearance, so I chose to walk home from work. As I did, I noticed an electricity in the air from fellow pedestrians. A sense of urgency to absorb the warmth into their skin while they could, as we all knew this was a fleeting moment of luxury before it was business as usual with the miserable weather.

I’m reminded of a comic that made me chuckle:

I was disappointed I couldn’t finally retire my winter coat for the season. But I was thankful for the opportunity to practice sincere gratitude. By June, winter will be a distant memory banished from our consciouness, and we’ll be complaining about the weather, as though we never longed for the weather in April.

Maybe, just maybe, the folks of Toronto appreciated the 14-degree high, just a little bit more, because it represented a literal ray of sunshine breaking through the monotonous doldrums of our current spring.

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