Meditations in the Cold

I’m walking home from school on a glacier that is my route home. I look to the side of the road and see what looks like a fault. Running through it is a stream of water that serves as a natural drainage system and I wonder how the water hasn’t frozen. I see patches of blacktop covered in black ice and I realize that I haven’t set foot on solid ground in my town in months because the sheet of ice is still inches thick. On such terrain I go.

It is -14 degrees Celcius. In the distance I see trees stirring in the howling wind and I anticipate the wall of wind that approaches. In such cold your nose hairs freeze instantly and when you breathe you can feel them prodding the inside of your nostrils. The inevitable drip of snot starts to flow but your face is too numb to notice until you get inside. A sniffle will only remind you that your face is frozen and it feels like dough as it slowly returns to its normal position. Have you ever felt so cold that you thought you were going to puke? I can say that I have. I didn’t know if it was the Indian food I had that morning or the tight thermal underwear that was applying pressure to my gut or the most likely suspect: the extreme, biting cold. It was probably a combination of all three. Nonetheless I can say with complete confidence that I’ve never been in such cold weather before. It is weather like this that makes one want only to run home and bundle up in blankets with a pot of mulled wine. Twice I’ve resorted to such devices.

And amidst the cold and the long dark and the hostile canine neighbors that make it extra hard to find the resolve to step out of my apartment, I have to remind myself that service is hard. It is indeed a sacrifice. If it were comfort that I was looking for, I would not stay here. But it is in times like these that I remember the issue that is at the heart of service, of altruism. It is in times like these that I have to remember that to “love one another” (John 13:34-35) is indeed a choice. And the perfect example comes from the one who said it. In the very same chapter of John, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet several verses before he utters those words that are so simple, yet so hard to put into practice.

Many of us volunteers came expecting something. Many of us came to run away from something/s (as some of us discovered). We have to ask ourselves this one question: “if I were not able to see the fruits of my labor or receive some sort of personal satisfaction from service, would I still have gone through with it?” (This gets to the heart of the paradox of altruism). In other words, is there such a thing as a truly selfless act?