It’s the end of January and there’s a definite chill in the air.
The news the past few days has been filled with revolution and upheaval. Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are in the throws of major democratic shifts, shouts of protest and calls for change. It’s hard to imagine the feelings and emotions that those who are standing up are experiencing, but it’s a process that has happened again and again over the centuries and millennia. It happened here more than 240 years ago.
Sudden, dramatic change tends to be the exception to the rule. Normally, change occurs slowly, incrementally over time, often occurring outside of our view. I, like many of you, like to pretend that, basically, things stay the same – we create schedules and divide our time into chunks to mark out the passage of days, weeks, and months, knowing that Mondays are nothing like Fridays and that afternoons aren’t anything like mornings, and so on.
And then:
Every once in awhile the sky opens up and sends us a reprieve from the normal day-to-day routine.
As a kid, I rarely had snow days here in OKC, but when they came, there wasn’t a better feeling in the world.
Forecasts and predictions aren’t always right, as we know, but with a reasonable eye toward logic and fact, we prepare for what is likely to happen. Based on our prior experience, we know that an upcoming weather event will share some of the characteristics of prior events and if we’re thoughtful, we’ll be reasonably ready to cope. In the case of the upcoming snow-pocalypse the impending and certainly incessant Doppler 9000 alerts will interrupt coverage of events happening in the Middle East and northern Africa, whether we actually get snow or not.
In my role as Head of School, I get to do some interesting things and I have certain powers that come with a great deal of responsibility. My favorite of these powers is the power to close school. For instance, I could, right now, go ahead and cancel school for tomorrow and take all the excitement of waking up bleary-eyed to a news ticker scrolling across the top of the screen, intensely and alphabetically focused on the arrival of the first of the “C”-named schools to declare that elusive and tantalizing “Snow Day”.
I could, but I won’t. Despite the incredible power of the Doppler systems and the wisdom of Gary England, too often the weather guys get it wrong, I call off school, and my favorite superpower becomes my biggest headache.
Despite all assurances that the snow will indeed come and we will be sleeping in just a bit longer, I don’t want to deprive you of the anticipation and excitement of the possibility. Life has far too few pleasant surprises as it is to deny you of that simple gift.
At my house, I’m ready. I’ve prepared a large vat of chilli, I’ve bought a bag of Fritos, made sure we have ample supplies of sour cream and grated cheddar cheese. We all have our favorites, but in my opinion, there is nothing better than Frito Chilli Pie when it’s too cold and snowy to go outside.
If we don’t have school, and because tomorrow our local channels will likely be filled with news about the snow, or lack thereof, I urge you to take some of your day and devote it to finding out what’s happening elsewhere in the world – why is it that the people of Tunisia, Egypt, and potentially Yemen have decided to take their future in a new direction? What could it mean for their ability to pursue their lives the way they want to pursue them? What might it mean for you?
